Weapons of Mass Destruction

by Margaret Vandenburg

  At 1700 hours, Operation Vigilant Resolve went into overdrive. The Thundering Third had never been asked to sustain such a furious pace, not even speeding across the desert to Baghdad. It felt like an omnipotent boot was pressing the accelerator to the floor, completely oblivious to twists and turns in the road ahead. Lucky for them, they encountered very few obstacles. Contiguous platoons raced to keep up with each other, clearing house after house with the relative ease of the first few days of the campaign. Lack of resistance seemed ominous given the fact that they had penetrated so far into East Manhattan.

  “The calm before the storm,” Trapp said. They figured he ought to know, having weathered many a hurricane season on the Gulf Coast.

  Combat time set in. One minute it was midnight, the next noon. The only difference between night and day was the presence or absence of night-vision goggles. The men were on autopilot, fighting all the more effectively when they were too tired to think. Up to a point. The armed forces had yet to invent a drug that could replace sleep altogether. On day five of the offensive, Radetzky initiated catnaps on a rotating basis. Squads worked ten-hour shifts and then crashed for an hour or two in makeshift bunkers. Acting as chief medic in the absence of Doc Olsen, who was god knows where, Trapp was concerned that Provigil was taking a toll on the men’s nervous systems.

  “We can’t go on like this forever,” Trapp finally said.

  “You won’t have to,” Radetzky said. “Centcom is bringing in another battalion. They think we can close the deal in another couple of days.”

  “What’s the rush?”

  “Plunge before they pull the plug,” Radetzky said, and left it at that. An aerial photograph of the city monopolized his attention. Lines of thumbtacks were at the ready, poised to attack.

  “That’s not our man Radetzky talking,” McCarthy said, out of earshot. “Sounds more like a slogan than an op plan.”

  “He’s quoting somebody,” Sinclair agreed.

  “Somebody high and mighty and clueless.”

  They disliked fighting in the dark without a clear sense of how their mission fit into the overall war effort. Whenever possible, Radetzky kept them in the loop. Very few commanders briefed their platoons with such attention to strategic detail. But he was too good an officer to jeopardize his men’s morale for the sake of transparency. Sometimes too much information was a burden. He almost wished he weren’t privy to the politics of the invasion, a conflict concocted in Washington and hotly contested in capitals around the world. There were definitely too many cooks in the kitchen, a recipe for disaster.

  Sunnis in the Iraqi General Council were threatening to resign because US Marines were trouncing their cronies in Fallujah. Doves in London were squawking about civilian casualties. Paris issued a statement denouncing excessive use of force in Anbar Province. As usual, hawks in Washington were impatient with the political posturing of their allies, even though their own approval ratings were slipping precipitously. Press coverage had swung to the left, and Operation Vigilant Resolve was being portrayed as a slaughter of the innocents rather than righteous retribution for the Brooklyn Bridge atrocities. If the political climate didn’t improve, Centcom might be forced to issue a ceasefire, even though conditions on the ground promised to bring the city to its knees within a matter of days.

  Colonel Denning had originally questioned the advisability of the offensive. Now that his troops were in the thick of it, he wanted to finish what they had been compelled to start. Whatever goodwill had been spawned by meet-and-greet detail had been snuffed by recent incursions. A cease-fire might look good on paper, but it would strand soldiers in the middle of a hostile city. They were fighting on two fronts, one in Fallujah, the other at the Pentagon, where military strategists were trying to wrench the reins back from the White House. Marines were caught in the crosshairs of almost unprecedented levels of government dysfunction, all the more reason to strike while the iron was hot. Pulling punches now would be suicidal.

  The good news was that the funnel was working. Kilo Company was intercepting insurgents fleeing from the Jolan offensive. The bad news was that the insurgents in question were family men. Radetzky was furious. His bid for promotion had been jeopardized more than once by civilian casualties. He might have been a captain by now if women and children had stayed out of his way. His commanding officers thought he was too humane for his own good, a misunderstanding of his primary motivation. He was actually protecting his platoon from the threat of so-called innocent bystanders. Turning a blind eye to indiscriminate killing always backfired, leaving deep emotional scars in the wake of the slaughter. He owed it to his men to bring them home in one piece, psychologically as well as physically.

  Radetzky reported the civilian exodus to Colonel Denning. With three battalions advancing in concert, there were too many moving pieces to let platoon commanders make vital strategic decisions. From here on out, battalion headquarters would be calling the shots. If even one squad lagged behind, a dangerous breach in the line of scrimmage would leave the whole company vulnerable to attack. Funnels could work both ways, allowing civilians to trickle out and insurgents to rush back in. That’s where intelligence came into the picture. Identifying the source of the leak might actually help speed things up in the long run. Unfortunately, given the accelerated pace of the offensive, there was no guarantee there would be a long run. The colonel adjusted his strategy accordingly.

  “Find out where the hell they’re coming from,” Colonel Denning ordered.

  “Then what?” Radetzky asked.

  “Plug the hole.”

  “What about the women and children?”

  “What about them?”

  “What the fuck am I supposed to do with them?”

  “They’re on their own, Radetzky. We’re a military outfit, not a babysitting service.”

  There were orders Radetzky couldn’t issue with a clear conscience. But he could obey them just as his men obeyed them, without question. Working around such ethical dilemmas was part of being a good officer. He left his radio frequency open, allowing the entire platoon to hear the revised rules of engagement, straight from the horse’s mouth. Colonel Denning’s command was incontrovertible. They would engage with civilians to gather intelligence. Otherwise they would ignore them.

  Easier said than done. Squads stacked through front doors and families rushed out the back. Sinclair watched them dashing across courtyards and snaking down alleyways. Snipers had the advantage of seeing them out in the open. They could shoot around them, conditions permitting. He pitied gunners who had to guess who was on the other side of a closed door. They found women locked in bathrooms and children cowering in bedroom armoires. Mistakes were made.

  Sorting out civilians and combatants had been much more straightforward the first few days of the operation. The groups were smaller, usually just a mother and her children. Occasionally a father showed up. Determining whether he was armed with malicious intent could get tricky. Using families as camouflage to move from one position to another was standard practice. Desperate men deployed more desperate measures. In Ramadi Sinclair’s platoon had confronted an insurgent grasping his daughter in one arm, a pistol in the other. Sinclair managed to pick him off without harming the girl. Overcome with grief, she threw herself on her father’s body, oblivious to the fact that he had just used her as a human shield.

  “Blood is thicker than water,” Wolf had said, prying the girl loose so they could search the corpse.

  “Tell her father that,” Sinclair said.

  He grabbed one of her wrists but she twisted free. Logan rushed over. It took three of them to restrain her.

  “The prick.”

  Untold numbers of families risked their lives to remain in the combat zones they called home. Born and bred with the taste of war on their lips, they had grown accustomed to its bitterness. Perhaps filial devotion and patriotism were more closely aligned in the Middle East than in the West. At every turn, cultural differences seemed to
favor the cause of the insurgency. Winning wars against armies was one thing. Fighting the combined forces of religion, regimes, and kinship ties was far more daunting. Americans had superior military might on their side. The question was whether weapons alone could prevail over so many convictions so deeply rooted in the marrow of the land.

  A burqa appeared in the window of a posh three-story residence. A minute later a woman emerged from the back door, five kids and a teenage boy in tow. Her clothing was far more modest than the house. Sinclair assumed she was either a servant or just passing through the neighborhood in search of increasingly elusive asylum. The children’s heads were bowed, as though their safety depended on keeping their gazes glued to the ground. Only the teenager’s eyes wandered, almost imperceptibly. He was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, a sign of either Western influence or a disguise masking his militancy. The only certainty was that he walked suspiciously close to the woman. The others were young enough to want to cling to her. But older boys usually kept their distance, asserting a modicum of independence even in kill zones. Sinclair zoomed in, looking for concealed weapons.

  “Heads-up,” Sinclair reported into his headset.

  “Location?”

  “Crossing the courtyard.”

  “That woman and her kids?” Radetzky demanded.

  “Could be a decoy.”

  “Got that, Wolf?”

  “Roger that.”

  Wolf’s squad was clearing a house just east of the civilian incursion. Gunners immediately manned the windows facing the courtyard. Sinclair could see that their angles were blocked by an old olive tree. Furtive patches of shade dodged Fallujah’s relentless sun. Radetzky’s team exited the neighboring compound, covering him as he shouted in Arabic.

  “Stop right there. Put your hands up.”

  The woman raised her arms in the air. Everything about her seemed to signal innocence. The teenage boy stood behind her, just beyond the perimeter of shade. Only Sinclair had a decent view of him. Something glinted. It might have been a belt buckle. No one in the squad noticed. They were wary but not alarmed, relying too heavily on Sinclair’s cover.

  “That goes for your kids, too,” Radetzky said. “Tell them to raise their hands over their heads.”

  The teenager took a small step to his left, compromising Sinclair’s sight line. Fortunately he was considerably taller than the woman, whose voluminous burqa all but obscured his torso. Something glinted again, and the barrel of a rifle poked out. The only possible target was the boy’s head. Sinclair squeezed the trigger, and the woman fell to the ground.

  “What the fuck—”

  A single shot had been fired, a bull’s-eye. The head exploded, spraying the woman and her children with gore. Sinclair told himself she couldn’t possibly have been wounded. He zeroed in on her face. Her eyes were closed. He scoped her chest, which rose and fell with each labored breath. She must have fainted.

  “Hold your ground,” Radetzky ordered.

  No one made a move to succor the woman. She lay dazed until the cries of the other children roused her. Radetzky’s squad kept their automatics at the ready as she tried to comfort them. Women were often used as bait in ambushes, even when they weren’t complicit. Sinclair surveyed the entire neighborhood. Another platoon was engaged in a firefight several blocks west. There were no threats in the immediate vicinity.

  “All clear,” Sinclair confirmed.

  The woman rose and led her brood away from the decapitated corpse. The youngest was still crying. The rest had resumed their guarded expressions, eyes trained on their feet. The self-possession of children in Iraq amazed Sinclair. Even toddlers comported themselves with preternatural calm. They made him wonder whether immaturity was more a performance than a state of mind, something kids staged to attract attention. Not that he begrudged them their little indulgences. Childhood wasn’t just a luxury. It was a basic human right, another casualty of war.

  The woman was picking bits of flesh out of their hair. She wiped their faces with tissues extracted one-by-one from a miniature Kleenex dispenser. There was something surreal about the sight of an American brand name amidst the carnage, a product specifically marketed to carry in purses, just in case. Judging from her impassive expression, she might have been blowing their noses. She was meticulous. Each bloody Kleenex disappeared into a pocket concealed in her robe, a deep-seated habit to avoid littering. If she had been complicit with the dead boy, she was hard-boiled. She would have made a perfect spy.

  “Trapp,” Radetzky barked.

  “Sir.”

  “Take them back to the cleared compound.”

  “Yessir.”

  Radetzky’s squad was long overdue for a catnap. In the meantime, Captain Phipps granted permission to interrogate the woman. Radetzky ordered Sinclair to cover the area until Wolf could spare a couple of gunners to pull guard duty. Wolf took his sweet time. They had encountered resistance in an adjacent alleyway. It was almost predictable. The minute civilians showed up, the fighting escalated. Sinclair hated to think that innocent bystanders were being used as decoys. But it was the lesser of two evils. The only other explanation was that there was no such thing as innocent bystanders in Fallujah.

  A half hour crawled by before relief showed up. Sinclair kept scoping possible targets, trying to keep busy to stay awake. The last thing he wanted to do before a coveted catnap was take another Provigil. He watched a pack of dogs slink down the alleyway. One of them raised its snout and caught the scent of his last kill. He stopped watching when they started nosing around the headless corpse. Finally he lost the battle and popped a pill. There’d be hell to pay if he couldn’t sleep when he joined the squad in the compound below.

  When he finally descended from his perch, Sinclair made the mistake of walking past Radetzky’s command center. He could have easily avoided it. Radetzky never failed to colonize the kitchen. Other lieutenants preferred the study, if there was one, or the living room. The kitchen must have been the command center of Radetzky’s home growing up. Johnson was leaning against the refrigerator, filing a report with Fox News. Radetzky was on the radio with Colonel Denning, confirming grid coordinates. The woman was sitting with her hands folded on a checkered tablecloth.

  Sinclair was surprised she was still there. Radetzky disliked civilian interrogations. He usually got them out of the way as quickly as possible so he could get back to the business of waging war. They must have let her wash up first. Her robe was covered with wet circles where she’d scrubbed out the blood. Otherwise there was no evidence of the shooting. A kettle steamed on the stove. A full cup of tea sat, untouched, in front of her on the table.

  She pretended not to notice Sinclair or anyone else. She looked at her hands the way her children had looked at their feet, as though she might escape notice if she kept to herself. Sinclair wondered if she knew that he was the one who killed the teenager. Her son. Whoever the hell it was. Her composure certainly didn’t rule out the possibility. An untrained eye might have mistaken it for detachment. Sinclair knew better. He had witnessed countless Iraqi civilians, mostly women, with that same distant expression. Burqas hid very little once you learned their body language. They tended to focus rather than mask emotions.

  Sinclair grabbed an MRE before going upstairs to crash. He stood, gazing out the window, while he ate. He could feel the woman staring at his back even though he knew she was still watching her hands. Iraqi women had learned to compensate for Sharia law against making eye contact with men. They could stare you down without even looking at you. She reminded him of the mother of the shepherd boy they had gunned down near Mosul. They had the same mute ferocity.

  His squad had been ordered to seize an airstrip. They were told in no uncertain terms that the area was crawling with hostile forces. It was high noon, so hot the desert horizon shimmered the way it does in old movies. Even the requisite camels were there, silhouetted against the glare. Then somebody fired the first shot. Camels flew one way, enemy combatants with ri
fles the other. The squad let loose, mowing down everything in sight. Only they weren’t enemy combatants with guns. They were shepherds with staffs, teenagers and their little brothers. And they were all dead except one. His mother was by his side almost before the storm of bullets subsided.

  “Shit!”

  “Is she armed?”

  “Where’s the medic?”

  They had just shot and almost killed her son, who had provoked them with nothing more than a herding stick. She turned to them, supporting the boy in her arms, without a trace of malice. All that mattered was saving his life, and only the soldiers responsible for his wounds could dress them. She didn’t humble herself. Her speechless supplication bristled with the power of mothers protecting their young. Rules of engagement notwithstanding, they suspended combat operations to treat the boy. She never thanked them, never even really saw them. The desert was filled with nameless, faceless threats. They were all the same to her.

  It was an unfortunate incident, the most ill-advised attack during their first tour of duty. But they knew better than to second-guess their impulse to defend themselves. If nations agreed to let gladiators decide the outcome of political conflicts, collateral damage could be avoided. Until then soldiers who served honorably were blameless, even heroic. Commanding officers were adamant on this point. Teaching men to kill without remorse was almost as important as teaching them to kill in the first place.

  “As long as you follow orders, you’ll never be guilty of war crimes.”

  Whenever shit hit the fan, Sergeant Troy’s voice came to the rescue, providing the ethical armor necessary to survive in Iraq. Too bad he never told them how to defend themselves against women. Not that they posed a direct threat. But if there were chinks in Sinclair’s armor, he knew damned good and well how they got there. Something about the woman in the kitchen got under his skin even more than the mother on that godforsaken airstrip. It might have been nothing more than proximity, the fact that he could reach out and touch her. House-to-house combat was claustrophobic enough without this shit.