Crows' Hill

Crows' Hill was a camp for Iraqi prisoners where Michael Downey and Tommy Singleton served as guards near the end of the Gulf War. It is remembered as the site of a secret execution that shaped the soldiers’ fate: the killing was concealed, and the men involved were successively confined, recruited for special operations, and delivered into the hands of The Department.

The Camp and Its Prisoners

Among the prisoners at Crows' Hill was a small group captured at an Iraqi military compound. A torture chamber had been found there, with electric batons, chains fixed to the ceiling, and a blood-streaked bathtub; no bodies were found. Some treated the absence of bodies as proof that the victims had been buried, though this was an inference rather than an established fact in Amos Crane’s account.

The Night of the Killings

One dark night, Tommy Singleton, Michael Downey, and several other soldiers took three prisoners from the group out to the wire and shot them dead. Crane does not know whether they were drunk or high, and says that he neither knew nor cared. The account makes the act both specific and partially obscured: the killing is certain, while the soldiers’ condition and the precise circumstances around their decision remain unresolved.

Concealment and Confinement

The soldiers could themselves have been shot for what they had done. Instead, because the war was popular and nobody wanted to disrupt the celebration, the incident was covered up. Singleton’s group was removed from Crows' Hill and kept in close confinement for the rest of the war; afterward, the army still did not know what to do with them. For years they remained a potential scandal.

From the Camp to The Farm

The men were eventually taken into special services, a development that brought relief in An Najaf, before being transferred to The Department once those operations ended. They were officially declared dead, a crude cover story designed to leave no loose ends. At The Farm, the remaining soldiers became subjects of an experiment involving a nerve bomb: immunization had worked for only seventy per cent, and officials continued to track how long it would take the men to develop cancers. Their escape from The Farm followed this chain of concealment and captivity, making Crows' Hill the beginning of a history that the authorities tried to erase.