It’s not until later that it starts to work on your head. A two-thousand-pound bomb falls on you and the chance that you get to continue living at that moment is one in fifty. It’s only when you get home that the idea that you should be dead begins to creep in.
The fog of war in Baghdad rapidly deteriorated into the fog of looting and anarchy. People were using whatever they could to move furniture and the like—cars filled to their ceilings, little white pickup trucks with beds stacked four feet high. I saw two guys driving a yellow front-end loader—the front end of which was loaded with filing cabinets and tables. When this happened, Secretary Rumsfeld, a man with no combat experience, just raised his eyebrows, squinted, and remarked smugly, “Freedom is untidy.”
We were clearing two walled Baath Party estates that had been squeezed between the Tigris and the refinery. Someone had bombed the hell out of the first building I entered. One had missed—landing in the back yard by pool, leaving a crater fifteen feet in diameter. Another had not. It had been a direct hit, blowing off most of the backside of the mansion. The blast had shredded the sides, leaving only the very front somewhat as it had looked before the explosion. Concrete and sandstone hung precipitously from what was left of the second story, while spindly strands of reinforcing steel round bar delicately held large chunks of the ruined structure together. The front columns were cracked and had shifted in places, giving them an ancient Greek look. They seemed desperate to maintain control of the building’s crumbling façade.
We only hesitated for a moment—out of concern for a possible collapse—before going in. When we did, we found there was nothing left. We went through every single room in the place, walking over and sifting through rubble in each one. From the debris, I was able to pull a single brass door handle. Everything else had been looted. Furniture, light fixtures, electrical outlets, wiring, doorknobs, everything.
As we were picking through the ruins, Sergeant Croom came in from the other compound. The first thing he said to me was, “Don’t go in the back yard. Motherfuckers’ll shoot at you from across the river.”
After a while I walked out of the crumbling front door onto the soft, green grass that made up the front yard. I wanted to see the other mansion. There were bits and pieces of the house covering the lawn, having been ejected during the blast. I walked out, walked down some cracked steps, onto the grass, and then stepped off a four-foot drop-off. I was right beside my truck. Someone had adorned the hood of it with an Iraqi helmet.
I thought about Croom’s advice. Motherfuckers’ll shoot at you from across the river. As I walked past the mansion in which I’d just been, I could barely see to the other side of the river—the property was raised about four feet, shielding me from the back of the house and beyond. As I moved closer to the gate, the raised portion sloped to an end. In front of me was a sixty-foot span through which I would have to move in plain view of the river. It looked to have been about four hundred yards from where I stood to the other side of the river.
I stood there for a minute weighing the chances. I didn’t think anyone could hit a moving target with an AK-47 at over four hundred yards. But I was still hesitant. I was wondering if perhaps today just wasn’t my day.
Then I thought about all the soldiers who had gone before me in wars past—soldiers who had moved through withering barrages of machine gun fire at close range, dodging hand grenades at every step. I thought about it and wanted to slap myself for being such a pussy.
I stepped out from behind the cover, wanting to move quickly, but still casually enough to look cool in case anybody I knew was watching. I moved in a sort of ambling shuffle. Then, halfway across the sixty-foot expanse, I heard the crack of the rifle. My head ducked instinctively and I kept moving, safely making it to the other side. I hadn’t felt the bullet or heard an impact—which was about what I would expect from someone with an AK from that far away. Nowhere close. But it was there. Somebody had been watching—and waiting.
The new building was far less exciting than the first one. It hadn’t been bombed, and that has a lot to do with how fun it is to explore a place. When I walked back to the gap between the properties that offered no cover, I didn’t hesitate. I didn’t sprint, but I didn’t shuffle either. It was more of a stride. With my M4 in my right hand, my left arm outstretched toward the river, and my middle finger raised defiantly, I ran. This time there was only the sound of boots clocking on concrete and labored breathing.
It almost hurt my feelings.
Later that afternoon we found ourselves back in the field with the anti-aircraft guns. Delta Company had been tasked with cleaning up the debris, mostly the unused ammunition. We were stacking the 57mm rounds in the beds of the humvees when Captain B. received a call on the radio that the scout sniper team on the second floor of the mansion was currently exchanging fire with somebody on the ground floor of the building. The Voice simply told him to bail them out—and fast.
Captain B. stepped out of his truck, still gripping the outstretched hand mike. There were several of us who had been standing near him during the conversation. He was obviously flustered, his face becoming redder by the second as it always did when he was pissed. He look at the group of us and asked, “Does anybody know how the hell to get there from here?”
“Yeah, I know how to get there,” I replied, putting on my helmet. “We spent over an hour there this afternoon.”
“Okay. We’re leaving in thirty seconds.”
Soft dirt and green grass were churned up as Sergeant Whipple, in the lead, sped out of the field as if his truck had been fired from a cannon. We drove in a line toward the refinery, Captain B. and Corporal Davis in tow.
During the frantic drive a radio call informed me that the shooting had ceased. It said that the scouts had exchanged gunfire, driving off the looters. They said they had fired shots, hitting the looters’ vehicle as it sped away. But for some reason, still holed up on the second floor, now the scouts suspected the looters had returned.
When we pulled to a stop in front of the mansion, everyone poured out of their vehicles and ran like in the TV show Cops. Somewhere along the way, formal infantry tactics had fallen by the wayside.
By the time I made it to the foyer, Sergeant Estrada was already hauling a looter out of the mansion with a firm grip on the man’s arm. Behind him, my guys hustled two other looters outside. One was a woman.
Within seconds they were seated side by side, flex-cuffed and with bags on their heads. I went in to try to figure out just what in the hell was going on. The first thing I noticed was that the car outside didn’t match the description I’d gotten over the radio. The second was that these three didn’t have a single weapon. And third, one was a girl wearing jeans and a t-shirt.
Captain B. had spoken with the scouts. It seemed that the sandbagged detainees sitting helplessly on the sidewalk had walked into the wrong place at a very bad time.
Nobody knew what to do with them, whether or not they had weapons. At that point we knew how to do only two things: kill or ignore. But if that had been combat math, then this was turning into combat calculus. Now, on a breezy April afternoon in Baghdad, we had just entered the biggest gray area since Vietnam.
Croom was standing near the unlucky looters. “What do we do now? I mean . . . what the fuck?” I asked when I got to him. We couldn’t just call the police and have them come pick them up. There were no police. And these people weren’t your standard enemy combatants either.
He just shrugged and said, “Fuck if I know.”
I looked down at the three, all of whom had their had hands tied behind their backs. I saw that the girl was shaking. The two guys sitting next to her were squirming nervously. For the first time I noticed they were all wearing jeans, t-shirts, and tennis shoes. And sandbags. They looked harmless.
Suddenly one of the men spoke up. In heavily accented but understandable English, he asked his question in a quivering voice—one that hinted of guilt-ridden blame—as if it had been his i
dea to come here and he felt responsible for his two friends.
Through the dark-colored sandbag he turned his head up to us and asked, “Are you going to execute us?” He asked it in a tone that conveyed his expecting the worst. The man was convinced he was about to die.
Are you going to execute us?
I stopped breathing for an instant, trying to figure out if he was joking or not. I realized that he was not. I glanced at Sergeant Croom, trying to think of a way to respond. Puzzled, Croom looked back at me with raised eyebrows.
He looked down at the guy without missing a beat. “Execute you? Naw way, man,” he said in his Southern drawl. “We’re Americans.” He looked up shifting his eyes to the river. “We don’t do that shit.”
The looter pointed his head back at the ground and simply nodded, as if he weren’t sure if we were going to tell him the truth or not.
It’s funny—Croom’s answer, while said offhandedly, had actually meant something to me. His tone had punched a hole in my cynical shell. It meant that the way things were done in this city had changed. The executions had ceased as of the last forty-eight hours. There would be no more throwing people off buildings, no more cutting off ears or cutting out tongues. There would be no more mass graves. It was just over.
The optimism we felt that day would wilt in the coming months, as most of Iraq would become a menagerie of freakish horror. But for just that day, for just that week, the people there were free.
An hour later we let them go, telling them not to go into any more abandoned buildings. When Sergeant Krueger handed them the keys to their car the girl broke down sobbing. One of the men held her. The other man, who had at one point told us he had lived in Buffalo, broke into a wide grin. He looked like he was going to start jumping up and down. All three of them were still shaking like leaves. As they helped the girl into the front seat, the English speaker started rambling to Croom and me excitedly. He thanked us over and over, letting us know how appreciative of us he was, and how he would never loot anything ever again.
In two wars I’d seen plenty of people who thought they were going to die. But it was always something abstract. These people, however, had been convinced that they were going to be shot with their hands tied behind their backs in the next few minutes. Witnessing their emotional roller coaster for an hour actually made my stomach turn. This was too much—too much power and too much reality. I’d been in two wars, literally joking my way through combat both times, without ever firing a shot. Even when I had known that my chances of dying were raised, there had still been room for humor of that special, macabre sort. But now it wasn’t so funny anymore. Everything over the past year and a half had been at such a distance. Now it was so close. Now I could see the expressions of fear and hear the cracking voices of those subject to my authority—those civilians caught in the midst of combat. They had been so scared.
This wasn’t what I’d been trained for. I didn’t want this. It confused me. Where was the real enemy?
For the first time I wanted to lay down my weapon and go home for a reason other than fear. What was I doing ten thousand miles from home, scaring a woman and two men out of their minds—to the point that they thought they were going to die? It was their country and I was the stranger. They had had absolutely nothing to do with yellow cake from Africa, chemical weapons, or 9/11, and yet, here we were pushing them around, exerting our power over them. This wasn’t what I was there for.
On the way back to the refinery I couldn’t get the image of that beleaguered horse in the Shah-e-Kot Valley out of my head. Like the looters, it too had been unwittingly caught up in events.
For several days I watch the animal as mortars and bombs continue to fall. It is an innocent horse trapped in the crossfire of humans working around the clock to slaughter each other. At times the horse seems placid, content to wait us out. Sometimes I think it is actually unaware of what is happening around it. But then, inevitably, a mortar round lands too close—either by accident or because a sadistic spotter calls it in—and the horse gives itself away by running and bucking and shaking its head wildly. Watching through binoculars it looks as if the animal is being driven insane by the sounds and concussions.
And then, after a while, it settles down, probably thinking to itself that this can’t last forever.
Seeing a living thing standing alone in the Valley was strange. It was so out of place there as explosives rained down and snipers’ bullets zipped back and forth. It didn’t seem fair. At night, I would listen to the Spectre gunship descend on the area and unleash its wrath. In the morning, I would always expect to see the carcass of what had been a lonely, frightened, and abandoned horse. Instead, I would see it standing on the valley floor, nose to the ground, looking for something to eat on the thawing soil. Just trying to live.
As the sun started sinking, we started winding down. I had my platoon consolidate with the rest of the battalion on the grounds of the refinery. There was an air of euphoria around the place. The thirteen-year-old conflict between the United States and Iraq seemed to be over.
Someone from Alpha Company had cracked open a fire hydrant. I hadn’t seen running water in nearly a month and it reminded me that I hadn’t really bathed in that time either.
After my first shower in the fire hydrant, I went and sat down on a curb, soaking up the day’s last rays and drying out. I heard yelling and looked up, reflexively reaching for my M4. I saw three freshly showered guys from Alpha Company wearing not a stitch of clothing between them, chasing and tormenting each other with their wet, twisted brown t-shirts. They were trying to smack each other on the ass. I thought maybe this meant we were near the end.
* * *
Dusk was setting in an hour later and I was standing outside my humvee eating a granola bar when the evening call to prayer commenced over a loudspeaker. The sounds of the muezzin were lilting, unlike the scratchy chanting I’d had to endure in Pakistan. The singing mixed with the sound of rustling leaves in a tree that towered over the refinery grounds. Had circumstances been different, the evening breeze and the sound of the prayers could have put me to sleep. Instead, I just stood there taking it in. Beyond the walls of the refinery I could see the beige dome of a small mosque from which I assumed the call was emanating. It sounded so peaceful—the sounds of gunfire having been replaced by calls to pray.
Then I noticed the smoke on the horizon behind the mosque. Two distinct plumes—probably oil fires, were still burning in the distance. The contrast was strikingly ominous. As I listened to the music and watched the black smoke waft over the city, I had a feeling in the pit of my stomach—as if we’d broken something and didn’t yet realize it. The call to prayer seemed a sign of normalcy—and of tranquility. But standing there snacking on my granola bar and looking at the evening sky, I began to feel uneasy—as if the smoke were somehow casting a pall on our success. On the surface, everything seemed great. The crackle of gunfire had diminished, along with the periodic explosions. But there was something in the way the oily smoke drifted silently beyond the mosque. It was almost an instinct, I guess—an instinct that told me we had been very naïve in coming to this place.
The war melted away. There was no announcement, no Army-wide proclamation; there was just being shot at one day, and the next day things were just different. Traffic began picking up. Shops started reopening and people began venturing out from their homes without the intention of pillaging.
I spent most of my second day in Baghdad tracking down the unexploded ordnance deposited by air force and navy aircraft—along with that left by the retreating Iraqi Army.
That day was like a big Easter egg hunt. We didn’t know it at the time, but we were actually competing with future insurgents to see who could collect the most Easter eggs by dark. Throughout the afternoon we found unexploded bombs, artillery pieces, caches of RPGs, and piles of anti-aircraft ammunition. Most of it we couldn’t transport in our humvees, so we just copied down the GPS coordinate for the piece in qu
estion and marked it on a map. Then we left, never to see it again.
Late that afternoon, I was told by Captain B. of a reported “debris field” adjacent to the Daura Expressway. He told me to go and occupy the field with my platoon until the explosive ordnance disposal guys showed up. Basically, just to go there, hang out, and keep the natives away from anything that looked dangerous.
To deal with the Iraqis, I brought along a female linguist who had been sent to us by Brigade. I was looking forward to having someone relieve the stress that comes with communicating through hand signals and facial expressions.
We arrived at the so-called debris field just as the sun was beginning to set. It was an open area of short grass and hard-packed dirt. The field was a square about three hundred yards on each side. Apartments bordered it on two sides. Initially I noticed two soccer goals on the field, along with groups of Iraqis going to and from the apartments. Then, as my eyes adjusted to seeking out weaponry, I began to see it.
The field was covered with ammunition in varying conditions. I could see two shattered artillery pieces nearby. It only took me a second to figure out that the Iraqi Army had emplaced a battery of anti-aircraft artillery pieces on the neighborhood soccer field. I could see that it had all been pulverized. The ground was a patchwork of littered ammunition that had been blown sky high during the attack.
We were walking through a garden in which highly explosive weeds grew. As I moved through the field, I noticed a piece of unexploded ordnance off to my left. It was big, yellow, and dented. It wasn’t shaped like a regular bomb in that it was more squarish rather than long. Stepping carefully, I thought of the words “Fat Man” and “Little Boy.” It had been dropped with the intent of destroying an expansive area. Now it just sat there.
Within a minute of our stopping vehicles, two hundred people were swarming the platoon. Every kid in the neighborhood wanted to see the Americans up close. I hurried to find the linguist, hoping that she could say something that would stem the rising tide of potential shrapnel recipients. I could just see a kid stepping on a leftover cluster bomblet next to me, sending us all to hell.
The War I Always Wanted Page 11