When we arrived on the outskirts of the town that day, Hillah was the last major Shia city still under the control of Saddam and the Baath Party. The Shias of Hillah had despised him from the very beginning of his reign. They rose against him and had been massacred following the first Gulf War in 1991, their bodies being stacked in graves on the outskirts of the city.
Pushing to within six miles of the city that day, we were reassigned from the ACP back to Delta Company for the attack that was to go off the next morning. I learned this from my commander, Captain Corey B.*, a red-haired West Pointer who had served with the 1st Ranger Battalion before joining the Rakkasans.
The main assault would be two-pronged, from the northwest and from the south. We would attack from the main road leading into Hillah from the west at dawn. In the meantime, a kind of skirmishing force had been sent forward to probe the outskirts of Hillah and to clear all the obstacles in the road.
By midafternoon, the units that had moved forward were in contact. Their brazen move to take down the Iraqi obstacles was too much for the Iraqi defenders to handle. It was an assault on the defenders’ pride, and they had chosen confrontation. Events were already unfolding as I dialed into the brigade net, 101.3 WRAK, All Rakkasans, All the Time.
Two Iraqis were already KIA. Two soldiers from Alpha Company had also been wounded, as had one soldier from our company. The Voice said that it was the soldier from Delta who had been the most severely wounded. A piece of shrapnel from an exploding hand grenade had hit him in the face.
I recognized the brigade commander giving instructions. There was talk of maneuvering to take a building, of firing tank rounds into buildings. It was surreal. It was like listening to a game on the radio. He goes into the shotgun . . . he drops back . . .
I stuck my head out of the truck to see if I could hear any of the fighting. Nothing. Just a light breeze in the grass and a few voices in the truck parked next to me. I looked up and saw a few wispy clouds and a handful of flying birds. I couldn’t hear any of the telltale sounds of combat—no thuds or poppop-pops. I guessed that we were still too far away to hear small arms fire. Around me, most guys in the company were just milling about, either bullshitting or lounging in their vehicles. They didn’t seem to care that a battle was unfolding six miles away. They didn’t seem to care that come morning, it would be us.
I wasn’t any different. As if I had no personal stake in the affair, I felt just as interested as if I had been listening to an embedded reporter on CNN back home. Wow, look honey. Those soldiers are in a fight on TV. What’s for dinner?
For a guy with friends in the line of fire at that very moment, I managed to surprise even myself. I hadn’t yet realized just how desensitized I was becoming.
By late afternoon the fighting was over. That evening a guy I knew gave me the rundown. He told of an Iraqi who feigned surrender, and then of the Iraqi’s comrades who appeared on a flank and began throwing hand grenades. He had ordered his platoon to launch high-explosive grenades from a Mk 19 into each window of a multistory building from which they had taken fire. He told of picking up the shell casings of rounds he had fired. He was keeping them as souvenirs.
By nightfall my detachment had become even creepier by normal standards. The orders had been given, maps had been laminated and disseminated, and the vehicles had been aligned for the morning attack. I had spent an hour trying to get a map of Hillah from the intelligence guys, and then another hour leaning over the hood of my truck in the dark trying to use a permanent marker to properly mark all of the objectives on the map.
I was sitting in the front seat again, listening to music, when Phil, my roommate from back in the States, walked over to me. To Lieutenant Philip Dickinson, another Delta platoon leader, the idea of charging into battle was even newer than it was to me. He had been in Afghanistan with us, but had arrived as a replacement, two days after Anaconda.
It is a chill and dusty morning outside the tents at Kandahar International Airport, and we are shaving out of canteen cups filled with cold water. I’ve yet to put on my desert camouflage top when I notice a band of new guys have entered our encampment. The first thing that strikes me is how fresh they look, with their pressed uniforms and spotless baggage. Captain K. still has shaving cream on his face when Phil introduces himself as the new officer. Captain K. grunts something and points the clueless-looking new platoon leader over to me. As he walks over, I stick out my hand and say, “How’s it going?”
I turned the music down when Phil leaned in, his arm resting on the hood of my truck. I looked up and greeted him. “Sup, dude?”
“Well,” he started, “I guess we’re ready to go. Everything’s lined up.”
Lips pursed and eyebrows raised, I nodded under the glow of my hanging green flashlight.
Then he continued. “You know, dude . . . tomorrow is ahh . . . tomorrow’s a pretty big day for us.”
I grinned up at him. There was no talk of getting killed or maimed or fixing bayonets to go building to building. There was no talk of failure. It was just going to be another day. A big day.
“Yeah,” I replied. “Yeah it is.” Then I asked him if he was nervous at all.
“You know, I can’t say that I am,” he said. “Maybe anxious to get going, but I’m not really scared. I guess maybe I should be. I don’t know.”
I knew what he was talking about. I was headed into urban combat in less than four hours and I wasn’t even scared. It was like the moment just before the helicopter touched down on the mountainside during Anaconda.
I was neither happy, sad, scared, nor angry. I don’t even remember thinking of my family. I just remember the music before Phil walked over. I didn’t think of my parents or my brother or Nikki. There was only the music.
I used it to dull my senses that night, but I knew that in reality I was hooked up to a low-dose adrenaline drip. I was becoming numb. I was becoming a thinking husk with a gun.
When I had eventually called in mortar strikes on non-American targets in the Shah-e-Kot Valley there had been no fear, no anger, no glee. I was a cyborg on a ridgeline putting steel on target. “Left 100, drop 50. Shot, over . . . Shot, out. Splash, over . . . Splash, out.”
Calling in the strikes became like ordering a pizza. You place an order over the radio for what you want—the type of ordnance you want used, where you want it to land, how much of it you want. “Yes, I’ll have four high-explosive mortars on such and such a building in the valley, please. Oh, and can I get two white phosphorous rounds also?” The Voice comes back with something like, “Of course, sir. Would you like smoke rounds with that? Or anything to drink?”
It’s times like that, I figure, and times like the fast-approaching morning in Hillah that you become emotionally dead. It is adrenaline. Overdose. Addiction. Your personal weapon becomes the needle, and every time you charge the handle to lock and load before a mission, you inject the adrenaline, which over time will become like heroin to you. You let yourself drift into an emotional coma. If you didn’t, you would go mad.
With just over two hours until the attack, Phil left me to my music and my thoughts. I started thinking about my grandfather. He was short and of a slight build, but he was one of the meanest people I’d ever met growing up. He had also been a marine sergeant in the infantry in the Pacific theater during World War II. As he’d gotten older, he’d mellowed out a bit and started carrying around a pocketful of peppermints to hand out to people he liked, but he never lost the edge the Marine Corps had given him. Before I’d received my commission, he’d bought a marine dress uniform so that he could render me my first salute as an officer during the ceremony. Everybody had talked about how cute the old man looked in a dress uniform with tattered ribbons from World War II.
Sitting there listening to the music on low volume, I remembered how before the commissioning, I figured that he’d be impressed when I told him that I too had joined the infantry. To my surprise, he’d just kind of shrugged and shaken his head. A year a
nd a half later, over conversation about my experience in Afghanistan, he’d looked at my grandmother quizzically and said, “I never understood why the boy went and joined the infantry.” He said this as if I weren’t standing there next to them listening. Now, in my current predicament—about to head off into combat again—I wished that I could have talked to him. I would have said, “Okay. Now I get it.”
I was just about to doze off when I had the sudden urge to take a shit. For a second I thought I would just hold it, but then I remembered that sometimes, urban combat could drag on for days. I figured I’d better take care of it now and worry about sleeping later. I knew I probably wouldn’t really sleep anyway.
As I stepped out of the truck to grab my shovel and head off into the night, I noticed some guys from the company kneeling in the darkness in prayer circles. I thought that it must be nice to have something like that on which to lean when headed into a possible shitstorm. It must be quite calming to know that by praying hard, God will be rooting for your side. Walking past them I thought about the character Ceranno in the baseball movie Major League, when he is discussing the link between divine help and hitting breaking pitches. “Ahh, Hay-seuss,” the big Latin American ballplayer says, “I laak him vera much. But he no help with curveball.”
Or with RPGs and small arms fire.
Captain K. has ordered me to go up on the high ground overlooking the valley to call in mortar strikes on suspected al Qaeda positions.
As I make my way up the rocky incline covered in dried yellow grass, I notice that Sam Edwards and some of his guys are already up there, watching. When I reach the top, I can’t help but stand there and stare out at the decimated villages below. My eyes are transfixed, just as they had been during the bombing of a few nights earlier. This is the closest I have come to the valley in daylight. It’s still half a mile away, but I feel as though I could reach out and touch some of the mud-brick buildings. It’s a battlefield, and I’m captivated by it. Sam sees me.
“Hey, man! Get down! Shit!”
I look at him resting on a knee several feet away from me. He looks strained, even older than I remember him being just a few days ago. It makes me realize what I’m doing. I’m standing there, in the wide open with no trees or vegetation for concealment. I’m a lone figure standing on an overlook, against the backdrop of nothing but blue sky. And I’m about to draw fire from the valley if I don’t change that quickly.
I duck and take a knee. Sam then tells me where the terrorists are suspected of hiding. He has already called in several strikes, so he knows. There is an al Qaeda anti-aircraft gun on Takhur Gar that I have in mind. We’ve been listening to it fire intermittently for two days, and thus far, no one has been able to disable it. But from our vantage point we can only hit the valley.
I grasp the hand mike from the radio and take another look at the landscape below. For the first time I see a brown horse, standing alone in a corral on the valley floor. For two days I’ve heard about this horse—through word of mouth and even once or twice on the radio. As I look down into the valley, it is the first thing to which my eye is drawn. The horse stands in stark contrast to everything around it.
The villages are now mostly rubble—cratered and blackened. I see firsthand what this horse has had to endure with each successive barrage of carpet-bombing, mortars, snipers, and helicopter attacks. I’ve also come to understand that people have been trying to kill it with a sense of passive cruelty. No overt efforts—just a sniper round here, a mortar there. They’ve yet to succeed, however. From my vantage point I can see that the horse is the only living thing in the valley, the only thing still moving in the open. It starts to trot to the other side of the corral, bucking its head once as it prances. It looks to be enjoying the warm sun along with the brief respite in the shooting. I try to comprehend how it has managed to make it this far—standing alone in the crossfire of this no-man’s land.
One of Sam’s soldiers sees me watching it. “Hey sir, you gonna try to hit the horse with the mortars?”
Without looking at him I say, “No, I’m going to try to hit the terrorists.”
“Aw, come on, sir. You can’t hit them . . . well, you can’t see ’em at least, even if you do hit ’em. Wouldn’t it be cooler to hit the horse?”
I turn my head and glare at him, deadpan. I turn my head back to the valley and put the hand mike up to my mouth. “Bulldog 9-5, this is 1-6, adjust fire, polar, over.”
“This is Bulldog 9-5, adjust fire, polar, out.”
“Roger, direction 4-520, distance 1-1-0-0 . . . .”
* * *
In under a minute, explosive projectiles that I have ordered like a grande mocha cappuccino at Starbucks are careening over my head toward human beings, hunkered down in dug out fighting positions. They also fly in the direction of a single brown horse—a horse that’s probably wondering what it has done to deserve this.
By late afternoon the weather has started to roll into the Shah-e-Kot Valley. I walk up onto a different piece of high ground with Sergeant Collins where we stand with Takhur Gar looming over us, watching the storm approach in the distance. We watch it travel from west to east, first enveloping the ridge known as the “Whale,” and then slowly moving across the open valley.
As the sunlight fades, we begin preparing for nightfall. The forecast is calling for a low around fifteen degrees—coupled with a wind chill that could drop well below zero. I try to remember if I’ve ever been that cold before.
By dusk it is snowing on our own ridgeline. It starts with big, fat flakes, before turning to the more plentiful small ones. It snows without respite for the duration of the night. The guys on watch have it the worst—they have to sit up on the high ground with no cover against the wind. Those of us in the low ground fare little better, with no shelter and few sleeping bags.
For the first part of the night I stay awake pondering life and listening to the sound of my teeth chattering. I gaze at the stars and listen to sporadic gunfire and accompanying explosions, all the while wishing I could be somewhere else. I wonder about the horse.
Around three in the morning, with teeth working like little off-white jackhammers, I give up on trying to rest. I start pacing in small circles on the rocky, snow-covered, and now muddy ground. I notice that this has become the first quiet night of the operation. There is no crackle of machine-gun fire in the distance; there is no Spectre gunship on station searching for enemy positions with its infrared beam. All has gone silent in the snowfall.
A few minutes later Sergeant Pascoe joins me. He is doing the same thing. It is simply too cold to sleep or even to sit still. We stand there conversing in whispers until the sky begins to lighten. We talk for several hours, though now I can’t recall a word that was said.
We are technically in combat, but in reality we are just two shivering guys standing on a mountain, talking about life and wondering if it will end soon.
The darkness was an inky black when I lifted my head up. I had been dozing in the front seat of my truck, half sitting and half leaning to my left on the console. I had used my load-bearing vest with its canteens and ammo magazines as a pillow. Looking out the front windshield I could make out the faint glows of several flashlights with red, green, and blue filters. I glanced at my watch. Not quite 4 a.m.
The plan was for the artillery to fire on targets in Hillah while we were still on the outskirts of town. Once that was done, the tanks would move forward with the dismounted infantry following on trucks. Then, inside this city of over 300,000 people, the Delta platoons, mine included, would be used to seize and secure key traffic intersections while the tanks drove forward into the heart of Hillah. Apache helicopters would be waiting on the east side of Hillah, hovering. Their mission was to destroy any Iraqi regular or irregular force that might attempt to flee what I thought, by that point, could be a burning city.
By 4:30 I had checked and rechecked our preparations with Sergeant Croom and my two section leaders, Sergeants Alex Estrada a
nd Michael Whipple. With fifteen minutes to go, I sat in the darkness pondering the idea that we could be driving into a hornet’s nest—pondering the idea that I might never see another sunrise.
Through the darkness I could barely make out the silhouettes of the trucks and tanks in the formation. I could hear them, however. Every vehicle in the convoy had been idling for minutes. The entire battalion sounded alive, as if it were a single organism—a lurking predator about to pounce. Outside the din of rumbling around me I could hear the jetlike whine of the tanks further ahead. The length of the column was such that it snaked around groves of palm trees and through the grassy field.
Radio traffic on the Delta Company net had been high as the platoons conducted final checks and procedures. Suddenly I heard the voice of Captain B.’s driver and RTO come across the airwaves. Corporal Davis announced that the lead vehicles, that being the tanks, were now beginning their advance toward Hillah. I keyed my hand mike on the platoon net and passed on the message to my other five humvees. I looked at my watch, pushed the Indiglo button, and saw that it was 4:45 a.m. I thought briefly about the defenders of Al Hillah and wondered what they would decide to do. Regardless, their time was up.
My driver, Sergeant Thomas Hemingson, steered onto the main road and we began following Estrada’s vehicle. Alejandro “Alex” Estrada was the informal point man in the platoon. He was short, stocky, and like everyone else, his dark hair had been shaved bald. He was the type of section sergeant that Croom and I could leave alone to just do his thing. He was dependable.
The convoy started moving at a steady fifteen miles an hour beneath the morning stars. As we drove, houses and buildings began to appear on both sides of the road. In one window I saw the silhouette of a person in front of what looked to be candlelight.
I wondered what they must have been thinking as they watched this rumbling column move through their neighborhood. With no streetlights, they had no way of clearly seeing us. They could only peek through window shades and listen. It was loud to be sure, but there was no shooting or yelling, there was no honking or screeching of tires. None of the preconceptions I had associated with an attack on a major city were being met. We were driving calmly and steadily in murky blackness.
The War I Always Wanted Page 8