The War I Always Wanted

by Brandon Friedman

As he pulled within three feet of my speeding humvee, I stared, wide-eyed, at the driver. He was an Iraqi man probably in his forties or early fifties. He had a thick, dark moustache with hair to match. However, his hair had receded on top, leaving most of his head completely bald. I looked at his eyes, hoping to glean from them his intentions.

  Keeping both hands on the wheel, he was nodding his head backward, pointing with his eyes toward the back seat. I could see that he was smiling. I was confused. Slowly I took my gaze from his face and moved it along the car toward the rear window of the moving car. I expected to see some form of weaponry pointed at me.

  Instead, I saw a little girl of no more than five wearing a white dress. She was outstretched, leaning half of her small body out of the car’s backseat window. Her arm was fully extended. In her tiny hand she held a rose.

  Then things became clear. I said, “Hey man, get closer.”

  “What?” Hemingson asked incredulously.

  “Just do it,” I said, shifting my gun to my other hand. “Slow down and get closer.”

  When he did, I stretched out my arm in its desert camouflage sleeve, reaching for the little girl. A moment later I grasped the stemless rose, briefly touching her hand. With the flower now in my possession, I withdrew my arm. She smiled at me. For a brief second I smiled back. As we began to pull away from the white car I glanced back at the man driving. Still smiling, he simply nodded at me.

  Shivering in the cold on the roof of an Iraqi barracks building that night, I was at the same time relieved and let down. I suddenly saw the attack on Hillah as being a big cock-tease. I had gotten so mentally prepared for bullets ricocheting off walls and RPGs crisscrossing in front of me that I couldn’t let it go. Now that the danger was over, I had reverted to being a junkie who needed a fix. I was jealous of the 3rd Infantry Division in Baghdad—they were getting action and I was desperate for some. As I saw it, I had now been in two wars and never squeezed the trigger on my own personal weapon. I had combat blue-balls.

  I was a raving storm trooper, but I was humiliatingly petrified of death. I wanted to fight, but I didn’t want to hurt anybody. I wanted to be a hero and I didn’t care if I was hero. I felt alive inside, but disconnected from everyone. I loved my family and friends and I didn’t care if I ever saw them again.

  I was suffering from emotional whiplash.

  8

  Baghdad

  April 2003

  As we approached the city limit, the first thought in my head on seeing the city was, Yep. That’s what it looked like on TV. It was a city alight with red tracers—tracers that glowed white in our green night vision. Some slashed horizontally through the darkness, while others arced upward into the night sky. But now they weren’t originating from the well-known anti-aircraft guns positioned throughout the city. Now the fight was close—now the tracers were from machine guns, Bradleys, and AK-47s.

  I knew so little of Baghdad before I first entered it, that now, looking back, I don’t see how I could have been so ignorant. When we left Hillah, all I knew of the Iraqi capital was what I had seen on TV in the first Gulf War—it was green and black at night there, and they had lots of anti-aircraft guns. That was what I knew. However, when I thought of the idea of Baghdad, my mind conjured other images—magic lamps and flying carpets; Ali Baba and Aladdin; Scheherazade and Sinbad. When we finally entered the city, half of me expected to be met by bullets and anarchy, the other half by cartoon characters.

  We swept into Baghdad on a night that found the city’s resistance in its final hours. The airport had been seized, the statue of Saddam toppled, and the Marines were thrusting into the eastern portion of the city. We entered from the south, on an abandoned Highway Eight. We were streaking down the empty road, looking for the interchange with the Daura Expressway. I hadn’t been prepared for the sheer size of Baghdad, for its freeways, loops, and exits.

  My section and squad leaders started calling about the tracer fire. “3-6, this 3-3, we’ve got tracer fire off to the left, four hundred meters, over.”

  “3-6, this is 3-1, 3-2 says he saw some fire off to the right, two separate bursts, over.”

  They kept coming.

  “3-6, this is 3-4, I just saw a tracer to my left, four hundred meters, over.”

  I liked the fact that they were alert, but this was definitely “gunfire that didn’t concern us.” Nothing was coming our way. I got back on the radio.

  “Hey, listen up,” I said. “We’re clogging the net with all these reports. I know you guys see tracer fire. We’re in the middle of a battle.” The italics were verbal and blatant. “That’s what you’re supposed to be seeing. This is normal for these conditions.” I wanted to say, “Call me if you stop seeing tracers. That’s something I need to know. That will be newsworthy.”

  Sergeant Croom cut in. “3-6, don’t you think they need to report this stuff? It’s kinda important, over.”

  I thought about it for a second. For once I actually felt like I was correct in the midst of dissent from all the NCOs in the platoon. “No,” I stated flatly. “I need to know when the fire is directed at you.”

  That night we escaped attention and camped out under the stars in a farmer’s field, surrounded by a forest of palms.

  The Daura refinery is the main oil processing point in Baghdad. Its towering and flaming stacks are symbols of the city’s vitality—when they are snuffed out, the city goes with them. In the first Gulf War, Allied planes had bombed the refinery, rendering it useless for nearly a year. This time, however, the refinery—the economic heart of the city—was spared from destruction. It sat against a bend in the Tigris River, between the river and the Daura Expressway. Before dawn we finalized plans to clear an eight-square-mile area of which the refinery sat directly in the center.

  The battalion didn’t really have a mission in the strictest sense of the word. Instead we were tasked with “clearing” the area. The word “clear” in this case was used very loosely and very subjectively. It basically meant that we were to use the forces of order and goodness to neutralize the forces of chaos and evil. That could mean anything from attacking foreign fighters to stopping looters to capturing weapons caches to observing traffic patterns. There was no plan. There were only sectors. This is your sector. Go there and clear it.

  So Sergeant Croom and I, along with our fourteen soldiers, set off into the urban wilderness of Baghdad. We had six humvees, lots of ammunition, over a million dollars worth of equipment, and no idea what the fuck we were going to do with it all.

  After its sacking during the Mongol invasion, Baghdad never fully recovered its previous economic or cultural prominence. To that point, the city had been the flourishing center of the classical Islamic world with a population of up to a million people. When Hulagu Khan led the Mongols in their attack on the city in 1258, they slaughtered eight hundred thousand of the city’s inhabitants. They also destroyed the city’s irrigation system—a move that effectively ended the Abbasid Caliphate. Afterward, the city that had been a major hub of commerce on the road to China shrunk to just over a hundred thousand people. From the time of the Khan’s invasion, Baghdad has gradually rebuilt itself, literally from the ground up—suffering through other, less drastic occupations all along the way.

  When we arrived on that April morning as the latest in this long string of invading armies, the city had nearly six million residents and a Western-style urban infrastructure. Several of the six million made our first few hours interesting with some periodic harassing fire. They would fire one round and take off, making me even more jumpy than I already was.

  An abandoned battery of anti-aircraft artillery sat unattended in a grassy field, just off the Daura Expressway. Croom had radioed me with the information. I asked him if he’d done anything about it and he said no. He said he hadn’t felt too keen on the idea of leaving the road to go traipsing around Iraqi Army positions in the open without any cover. When I saw the same pieces from the road I didn’t have to think twice about
the decision to get out and explore.

  I stepped out and shut the door. As I did so, a few of the first Iraqi cars and trucks to venture out that day sped past us, probably curious to get a look. I turned to look in the direction of Sergeant Krueger’s truck when the glint of something on the ground next to one of his tires caught my eye.

  As I walked over, I could see that it was a pile of discarded clothes. On top of the pile was a shiny object reflecting the morning sun. I picked it up.

  It was an Iraqi campaign ribbon with a medal attached. The two-inch-long ribbon was striped in four colors—red, white, green, white again, and then black. The red, white, and green I knew were the colors of the Iraqi flag. The medal itself was an eight-pointed gold star with a solid black circle in the middle. Inside were two swords pointed upward. Above them was a red triangle within which was the Iraqi eagle. The ribbon, I noticed, looked faded and worn. Probably, I thought, thrown in the road by a soldier fearing American retribution. I would learn only later that the ribbon had been issued for service during the Mother of All Battles in 1991.

  Estrada and I set out to check the triple-A guns while Krueger stayed on the highway to direct the gunners who were providing cover. The anti-aircraft guns were set two hundred yards off the expressway, in a green field of waist-high grass. We gingerly walked down a slight hill and then picked up a dirt road leading from the highway down the length of the field. On one side of the road was the field; on the other was a thick orchard.

  At the same time Captain B. and Corporal Davis, along with Phil Dickinson and some of his guys, were nearer the refinery investigating their own set of artillery pieces. They had discovered theirs around the same time we found ours.

  Estrada and I picked up the hard-packed dirt track and began following it. After about a hundred and fifty yards, we came to a tree on the edge of the path. Beneath it were the abandoned belongings of Iraqi soldiers. There were clothes and black leather combat boots. There were three or four yellowish helmets. There were also the remains of what had been a meal. They had left everything and disappeared.

  I had never seen an anti-aircraft gun before. The first one we came to was painted the same flat yellow as the helmets. It was sitting on the edge of the dirt road, looking broken and abandoned by owners who had bailed out in a hurry. The barrel was pointed level, as if its caretakers had lowered its aim from the sky in a final act of capitulation. I noticed that the gun was still locked and loaded. Around the artillery piece were strewn over a hundred rounds of ammunition. There were bits of wood and pieces of metal—the remnants of the ammo boxes broken apart to load the weapon.

  I picked one of the projectiles up.

  “Fifty-seven millimeter, high explosive, sir,” Davis explained to Captain B. He was looking down at the forearm-length triple-A round he held in his hands. They all had their hands on the gun, each soldier exploring the still-loaded weapon from a different angle.

  Phil stood watching as Captain B. asked if anyone had a clue as to how to unload it. The commander didn’t want to leave the artillery unattended while it was still capable of wreaking havoc. Davis set his round down and said, “I bet I can do it. It doesn’t look too hard.”

  He stepped up onto the platform and then sat down in the anti-aircraft gunner’s seat.

  The large caliber ammunition I held said “57-MM, High Explosive.” I didn’t like it for some reason, though. Because it was larger, it gave me the irrational feeling that it was more volatile than the grenades I’d been used to carrying. I set it down and then turned to Estrada who was poking around some other pieces of equipment. We made eye contact and then I just shrugged and said, “Huh.”

  We stepped out onto the dirt road away from the cannon. I had my hands on my hips and I was scanning the whole field, wondering who I should call and how we should handle this. I thought it was a bad idea to leave the pieces out there unattended.

  Davis squinted his eyes, searching for the triple-A equivalent of a charging handle. When his hand found something that seemed like it would eject the round, he smiled. Then the corporal looked up at the captain and lieutenant and said, “Oh here, I think you just pull this down . . . .”

  The explosion tore through the orchard with a thunderous roar. Estrada and I turned and we ran. We didn’t say anything. We didn’t even look at each other. We just ran. I began sprinting back down the dirt road. Estrada went another way, darting into the field.

  * * *

  Captain B., Davis, and Phil watched in wide-eyed horror as the round skipped off the ground like a stone on water, careening into the orchard in front of them and disappearing.

  I was running at full speed wearing an armor-plated vest, carrying 210 rounds of ammunition, and an M4. It did not slow me down one bit. My arms were pumping in long sweeping motions, my legs stretching out to grab longer and longer pieces of ground with each stride. I could see the humvees on the road—far, far away.

  Estrada was running in a diagonal direction from me. I could see that he was already in the center of the grassy field. The poor guy was running zigzags in a weak effort to make himself a harder target to hit.

  As I ran I was convinced that we had just walked into an Iraqi ambush. I was certain that they had just blown a claymore mine and for some reason were delaying the act of opening fire on us. Maybe they were surprised it had missed us.

  I began gulping air as my lungs started to burn under the weight of my equipment. As I got closer, I could see Krueger’s gunner steadying his aim on the Mk 19, ready to open fire on anything that moved.

  By the time I got back to the incline at the edge of the highway my lungs were nearly bursting. Somehow I dragged myself safely back to the trucks. In gasping breaths, I tried to ask Krueger if anyone had seen anything. “Did you . . . did you guys . . . did you see . . ?” I stopped trying to talk and just pointed in the general direction of the Iraqi guns.

  The range of normality is expanded in a war zone. After a while, you get so desensitized that big guns can become little guns, and big deals can become not-so-big deals. Like when someone accidentally fires a high explosive round at you from a crew-served anti-aircraft cannon—in the middle of a bustling city, not two hundred yards from an expressway.

  When Phil told me later that night what happened, I just thought it was kind of amusing and gave him an eyebrow raise and shrug of the shoulders. By the time Davis had launched the 57mm anti-aircraft round at Estrada and me, I was serene about the fact that, on a battlefield, things tend to go flying where they’re not supposed to.

  The morning has dawned clear and sunny. For us, nothing has changed. Our mission is still to block and call in mortars—and to await word on whether Zia’s Afghan troops will sweep through the valley or not. From what I understand, they are still in Gardez regrouping and recovering. After spending the night staving off frostbite, Zia’s indecision is not something about which I want to hear. As usual, Sergeant Collins wants to charge down into the valley, end it, and go home. I have mixed feelings about that, but know that what either of us wants has absolutely no bearing on the situation.

  By midmorning half the platoon is actively scanning for movement in the valley, while the other half thaws out in the warm sun. The day’s bombs have just begun to fall on Takhur Gar, Terghul Gar, and the valley. After thirty-six hours in the Shah-e-Kot, this is already beginning to feel like a regular day at the office.

  For some reason, no matter how much I prepare, I am never ready for the moment when it comes.

  This time it is the dreaded whistle—although it actually sounds more like an extended zzzZZZ. It has been the last noise heard by thousands of soldiers around the world for decades. It is the sound of incoming. I look to the sky. I see it falling. It is dark, maybe black. It is fifty feet off the ground. It is falling. It is falling fast. It will land on my platoon. It will not negotiate.

  When it impacts, I will no longer exist.

  This is it. This is my only thought in the one second before I die. I c
an’t get down before it hits. I am moving in water—in slow motion. I am trying to dive—trying to live. I must get as flat as possible.

  It strikes the earth within feet of Private Paguaga. I can’t recall hearing the sound that comes with the impact. I am only aware that I am still alive. I start yelling, “Mortars! Mortars! Mortars!” I hear other voices calling out: “Incoming! Incoming!” I am trying to bury my face into the ground and call out orders at the same time.

  We have been targeted. In a matter of seconds the sky will start raining mortars. And we’re just sitting here. We’re not dug in. We have no cover. And we sure as hell haven’t received any warning.

  For a second we wait. Everyone is flat on the ground. No one knows what to do—run or hold. We are trained to run—to get out of the impact area—but in this case we have been ordered to hold this ground. Another few seconds pass. Suddenly from ground zero comes a raised arm. It is Private Paguaga. He is still lying flat, but waving his arm for all to see.

  “I’m okay!” he calls out in his thick Nicaraguan accent. “I’m okay! I’m okay!” At this point I am struck by the fact that the projectile—whatever it was—had not detonated. It had been a dud. But now we await the rest. I lay there bracing myself.

  The air has become quiet again and the CP is silent as well. They seem just as confused as we are.

  Then Taylor summons me to the radio.

  Of the select group of humans who have heard the sound of a satellite-guided bomb right before impact, not many have survived to tell the world what the noise is. It’s more of a zing than a whistle. The movies got it all wrong. It sounds like the sky is unzipping itself.

  When an American F-16 mistakenly drops a two-thousand-pound bomb on your platoon—a bomb with a two percent failure rate—you don’t forget it. But it becomes more of a big deal later. When it happens, you just think, wow, that was close, and you leave it at that. You think, somebody better tell those motherfuckers to redirect.