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They find another door, and Jamal, Matt, and Moyer work on it. As soon as it opened, it was stale air, like a closet you hadn't been in for a long time. There were two sheets coming down at real weird angles, covering the windows.And it looked like the floor was tiled with metal boxes. There is a total of $200 million in $100 bills in fifty galvanized-steel crates, riveted shut, with blue nylon bands around them. And then it just, one box began to-we had to know what it was-one box began to be opened. [This is how Matt says it.You can tell on the Novak tapes when he's getting close to the money-his vocal cords tighten, he searches for words. The actions become disembodied. The box is opened. Like there is a ghost in the room, a spirit brought to life by the Novak Eight, made up of the shadowy parts of themselves none of them want to own, and this spook does the dirty work.] The top comes off awkwardly, and money spills to the floor in a great avalanche. Jamal can hear his heart beating in his ears. Is surreal the word? Just fantasy, you know what I mean? When the first box was opened I was like,There's no way this shit is real. I think I said, "Holy fuck."
At almost the same time, a vehicle pulls up, and in walks First Sergeant Wilson and, depending on whom you ask, First Sergeant Burns. [While first sergeant is a pretty high rank, it's not higher than lieutenant, which means that Greenley still has de facto responsibility. But Wilson has about twenty years' experience on Greenley, which leads to a bit of confusion about who, exactly, is in charge. Right here, you see the notion of rank and the circumstances at that moment in Baghdad, undoing the normal sense of right and wrong. This is a common occurrence in war. Because what war does is turn what we accept as the unimpeachable rules of morality on their head: We can say that incinerating people is right, that exploding skulls with.50-cals can be an average event after which one eats an MRE and watches Happy Gilmore. And what we use as synthetic filler for that internal, hardwired moral structure is military discipline. It's right because your superior officer tells you it's right. And Matt's crime was rejecting the synthetic filler, choosing himself over the system, being an individual. Saying, if it's okay for you to blow people up, it's okay for me to take a few million bucks that doesn't really belong to anyone. War invites nihilism, after all, and Matt Novak simply opened the door when it came knocking.]
Matt throws a stack of hundreds to First Sergeant Wilson. Say, First Sergeant, aren't you getting ready to retire? Everyone's passing money around the room now. Don't you have kids going to college? Maybe you need this for a new vehicle. Some gets shoved at Greenley. Hey, Lieutenant, this isn't right.You're senior here!They're just testing it out. They don't know themselves if they're serious about it yet.
"If you're going to do this," First Sergeant Wilson says, "do it smartly." [Keep in mind, this is the way Matt tells the story. But his version of events is almost exactly the same as the lead investigator's.] "Take only the used bills.The new ones are traceable."
But there aren't enough used bills in that first box. Most of them are crisp, untouched, wrapped in plastic. So, and here comes the ghost again, the second box gets opened.At that point, the whole room got fucking evil. Everything just going through my head. I won't have to live like a dirt-poor soldier. Saw my wife with a new wedding ring on. Lieutenant Greenley leaves with Jamal to hide one of the boxes a hundred feet from where they slept and alert headquarters to the find, faking to the chain of command that all is right and honorable under the watch of First Lieutenant Greenley. Wilson disappears into the night with an unknown quantity of cash. [Wilson has never admitted to stealing money.] This chaos is all the result, as Matt sees it, of the vital error in the plan: opening the second box. Listening to dumb-ass First Sergeant Wilson when he said the old bills weren't traceable. Like he knew what he was talking about.
[But really, the fundamental failure wasn't one of strategy; it was a failure of imagination. The money was like a blinding light to these guys-drawing them toward it, but way too powerful to actually look at and contemplate. It's not even going to be there, they thought as they drove over to the building earlier that night, not wanting to jinx it. It's not really going to be in those boxes, they thought when they saw the boxes. And once it was there, spilling out onto the floor and soaking up the blood from Matt's hand wound, Matt thought, There's no way that's real, it's impossible, it looks like Monopoly money, though logically he knew perfectly well that it was real. And so they found themselves in a situation they hadn't pla
Without even speaking to each other, Matt and Moyer take a box and drop it into a canal across the street. The plan is to report to command that they found forty-eight boxes instead of fifty, come back later with scuba equipment Matt had taken from Uday's house, and retrieve the money. Then Jamal comes back in the Humvee and drops another box in the canal, bringing the grand total of reappropriated money to $12 million. Before the curtain falls on the second act, there is about ten minutes of real happiness in the hot Baghdad night. This moment is as close as they would ever come to possessing that money, as close as they would ever come to free and clear. Jamal is drunk with the idea. He literally swoons and falls in the street. Does like the Nestea plunge. And Matt jumps on top of him.Who even remembers what they said to each other.
Lieutenant Greenley calls in the money and at that minute Lieutenant Colonel deCamp and Major Rideout are already in their vehicles and headed for the scene. There is still loose money flying around, and Matt finds a nice pocket in the top of a short palm tree and stashes $200,000 in it. Moyer and Jamal have $400,000 they don't know what to do with. It goes up into the tree, too; only now the stack is too high. You can see it from the road. This is so fucking stupid. They're walking back toward the building, and Moyer keeps pulling out more money-a handful of hundreds stuffed in his boots, a stack stuffed in his underwear. What the fuck? He's stashing money under rocks, in bushes, the Easter Bu
[When he gets to this part, you can sense the wheels in Matt's head spi
When Lieutenant Colonel deCamp exits the building after checking out the scene, he says: "There's three hundred thousand dollars missing." What is he, fucking Rain Man? [DeCamp was wrong; there was way more than that missing. But still, the man knew all was not right.] Fucking Lieutenant Colonel deCamp; he was born with a silver spoon in his fucking ass. And he starts reading Matt Novak his rights as the rest of the guys load the truck with the $188 million, while the rest of the money is…everywhere. Because, let's face it, enough people have had their hands on the $12 million, the process of dispersion is so far along, we'll never really know where it all went. (By the next day, Jamal Ma