by Roy Scranton
Word passed: stand by.
We dumped our gear and dug out MREs.
After eating I slung my rifle, lit a smoke, and walked down the line searching for someone to talk to. I found a bunch of guys standing watching three National Guard females changing their brown t-shirts. They’d climbed on top of their fuel truck for privacy but still we could see.
One girl was black or Hispanic, so timid she sat and all we could see was her forehead. Another was skinny like a boy, with buzz-cut hair, no tits, and a face like cratered rock. The third, she was our favorite. She had a nice face and brown hair pulled back in a ponytail—even in DCUs you could tell she was a woman. When she pulled off her sweat-soaked brown t-shirt, we cheered.
“Fuck you assholes,” she shouted.
She had a gut, love handles, big tits. We adored her.
Someone shouted “Hey take off your bra” and she gave us the finger.
They pulled on their tops and the brown girl yelled down, “Show’s over, shitheads.”
Reading took this as an invitation to go backstage, but the rest of us scattered. We walked down the line, me, Villaguerrero, Healds, and Bullwinkle.
“I bend that white girl over the hood this humvee and fucking bam, right in the fucking ass.”
“I want the Chicana.”
“She black.”
“No she ain’t. She a hundred percent Puerto Rican. I can tell, I got spicvision.”
“Wouldn’t that be spicdar?”
“Beanervision.”
“Beaners are from Mexico, motherfucker. I’m Puerto Rican.”
“Beandar.”
“You don’t eat beans in Puerto Rico?”
“They fucking eat bananas.”
“Anyway you couldn’t even see her.”
“Bananas and mangoes and shit.”
“I could see her face and that’s all I need, cuz that’s what’s I’m gonna have wrapped around my cock. Oh yeah, baby, oh you like it? Fuckin’ eat it, bitch.”
“Shit, I’ll take two and make a Nasty Girl sandwich. Bread, bread, I’m the meat. Make my own mayonnaise.”
“Fuck that. I’m gonna fuck the black girl. Y’all can fuck the dog.”
“She a fucking dyke.”
“Fuck, man, this point I put a MRE box on her head and call it even. I gives a fuck.”
“Hooah.”
do not let your imagination and fear run wild
I forced my eyes to the tires ahead, to the road, at the sky, to my speedometer, changing focus every few seconds. The greatest danger glowed in the yellow and red rear-bumper reflectors of the leading truck—watching them wobble and dip, sustaining their slow rhythms, blobs of dim, pulsing light undulating in the dark—only a matter of time and you wake up ditched, smashed, your humvee flipping, rolling, whatever.
I bit my cheek. I bit my tongue. I jammed my knee into a sharp edge of metal under the dash until my head cleared. I cracked hot Mountain Dew and chugged.
The line wavered and swayed as drivers dozed and awoke. We’d been driving for eighteen hours.
We turned off the highway down a dirt road running between a ditch and a wall, passing tall grass, palms, and farms. Things felt close.
Lights swam as I fought to keep my eyes open. My neck bent under the weight of its dumb head, like a cripple who can’t hold his face up, like I needed a tube to talk with. We followed the convoy past a checkpoint and turned to the east fading ashen to white. In the distance, some kind of tower stabbed into the lightening sky. We turned again.
I saw great bands of painted Indians boil up out of the dark on steaming war ponies, ululating, attacking with tomahawks and Winchesters. I’d make my humvee jump like a frog: bounce over the burning wreck and over the ditch by the road, bounce across low scrub to the savages we’d land on and kill with a splat. Bounce, bounce, fuck.
“Wake up, Wilson.”
The truck in front pulled off. I put us in gear. Too tired to care whether I’d fucked up or what, so I’d fallen asleep, so what. Fuck shit fuck whatever, cockfuck shitfucker asscunt.
“Where the fuck are we?”
I followed the five-ton onto an airfield. We stopped between two Black Hawks.
“We must be close,” I said.
“I think so,” said Captain Yarrow.
I jerked awake, pulling my seven-hundred-pound head up off the steering wheel. Captain Yarrow lay slumped against his door, drooling on his armor. Sergeant Chandler snored in back. The convoy was gone. The sky a cool and milky white.
We’d been left. Abandoned.
I slid into drive, honked the horn twice, then took off.
Captain Yarrow heaved forward. “What?”
“Hooah, sir.”
“What? Where’s the convoy?”
“Dunno, sir.”
“They’re what?”
“There.” Intersection. In the distance, off to the right, the line of red lights.
Loaded with gear, we shuffled onto the plane and rode east, out of the sky, down the night.
Stewardesses brought our meal and choice of nonalcoholic beverage. I watched White Oleander and slept through most of A Beautiful Mind. The screens all along the dim aisles flickered on the faces of sleeping soldiers.
Dreaming valkyrie wings: we’d be FNGs at first but lickety-split start wasting hooches and fragging LTs, di-di-mauing back to the LZ, dropping bloopers into rice paddies, riding Hueys into the Shit, hog on our hip. We’d have hearts and minds sharpied on steelpot covers, tattoo our days down till we’re short, wear our shit all fucked up and say, “Fuck the regs, man, this is Indian Country.”
We’d prepared our whole lives for this. Bombed little brown people, helicopters swooping low, the familiar sight of American machinery carving death from a Third World wasteland. We expected nothing less than shell shock and trauma, we lusted for thousand-yard stares—lifelong connoisseurs of hallucinatory violence, we already knew everything, felt everything. We saw it through a blood-spattered lens, handheld tracking shot pitting figure against ground. We were the camera, we were the audience, we were the actors and film and screen: cowboys and killer angels, the lost patrol, the cavalry charge, America’s proud and bloody soldier boys.
We stumbled blinking off the plane into the night’s heat and crammed onto buses that drove us to a tent in the sand, where we downloaded bags into a box trailer. Shuffled to another tent to wait. Mustered into another where we swiped IDs, shunting through the green machine’s hive mind, finally officially in theater. We got briefed on snakes and General Order One—no pork, no porn, no booze—then sent back to the tent to sleep. Then rousted again, onto buses driven by Arabs. We lumped in on each other in our gear, bitchy in the crowded stink. The sun rose over an empty desert.
At Camp Connecticut, a swath of tents pitched in the middle of nowhere like a mirage, we downloaded our bags from the trailer. We slept in piles like dogs. Not enough water. The high 114.
Lieutenant Colonel Braddock brought us to his tent for a PowerPoint presentation and speech.
“Men,” he said, “tomorrow we embark on a most important and dangerous mission. We have trained months for this, and it is the epitome of our job as soldiers. I am proud to be leading you into our unit’s first combat mission since World War II. I know you will acquit yourselves with honor and courage, because I know your leaders and they are the best leaders in the Army, and I know your sergeants and they are the best sergeants in the Army. Together we’ll accomplish our mission and follow up on our nation’s great victory in Iraq with successful stability-and-support operations and a peaceful transition to democratic governance.
“I know many of you are too young to remember World War II, but I think this is a good time to reflect on the tremendous work we did stabilizing and securing Nazi Germany after the war and for fifty years protecting it from the Warsaw
Pact threat. This was no mean feat, and if it seems overshadowed today by campaigns like D-Day and Anzio, then I will tell you this is a matter of perspective. Because winning the peace can be as hard, if not harder, than winning the war. We have our work cut out for us.
“In the coming weeks and months, we will be tested, challenged, and stressed, and there will come times when home will seem very far away. But let me remind you that we are Deep Steel, we are the tip of the spear, and home, men—home is here, with your fellow soldiers. We are each other’s family. We’re a band of brothers. Support each other, follow your leaders, listen to your NCOs, and we will overcome, we will rise up and grab that brass ring. We will succeed and we will be victorious.
“We are soldiers, the fighting men who man the ramparts protecting America from the insidious evils of terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism that now threaten our way of life. We’re here because Saddam Hussein was a threat to America, his nuclear weapons and biological programs poised to be handed over to terrorists who hate us because of our freedom, who hate our way of life, and who have no compunctions about murdering your wives, mothers, sons, and daughters in cold blood. Because of the great bravery and professional dedication of your fellow soldiers, Saddam Hussein is no longer a threat. Men, we’re here to make America safe, and to make the world safe for America. I have the utmost faith that you will rise to the occasion and make me proud.”
an arab worldview is based upon six concepts:
atomism, faith, wish versus reality,
justice and equality, paranoia, and the importance of family over self
No running water. No electricity. No AC. No grass, no carpet, no windows, no fans. Everyone in the world wears camouflage—the others talk gobbledygook and stare.
No running water means no showers, no sinks. No hoses, no faucets, no drains. No cold water, no ice. No laundry, no bath, no toilet.
We had a toilet. We had a plywood outhouse with three stalls. You sit on a wood O and crap in a washtub. Every day two soldiers pulled out the three tubs, poured in diesel and gasoline, and lit the shit on fire.
You stir the burning shit with a four-foot pole and drift around the smoke. You pour more diesel on the fire. You stir the shit. You gag. You stir. You eyeball the grunts in their hooch down the way, sleeping and playing cards, and mutter to yourself. The wind shifts and you circle, stir, pour.
•••
No music, no TV, no radio. No magazines, no newspapers, no news. No internet. No books except the ones you brought.
The only information came in daily briefs: Fedayeen active in the area. Today two soldiers were killed in an RPG attack. Coalition Forces are securing the city of Baghdad. Watch for a white and orange compact sedan, suspected Fedayeen vehicle. Be on the lookout for a blue or white pickup. Saddam loyalists may be planning a series of coordinated attacks.
Giant camel spiders roamed our camp, some bigger than a grown man’s palm.
One skittered across the sand at me on crazy legs and I stomped it. The thing reared back, inch-long fangs sawing the air, and lunged. I stomped it again, again and again, mashing it to yellow meat.
In addition to the camel spiders, there were brown recluses, black scorpions, mosquitoes, flies, fleas, biting ants, and, we were told, the deadly asp. There were cicada-like bugs in the trees as well, which didn’t bite but sang all day in maddening skreeks. When they stopped, it was like going deaf.
Wild dogs prowled the camp at night. The muezzin five times a day.
reminder, you are a representative of the united states while in iraq
it will be important to use good judgment, tact, and diplomacy
in any dealings you may have with the people
Mail came, packages and letters from home. I inked a chessboard onto the bottom of an upside-down apple crate and made pieces from scavenged Russian commo gear: the king and queen glass diodes, the rooks resistors, bishops capacitors.
We started catching camel spiders and scorpions instead of just killing them. Did they burn? Drown? Could you poison them with laundry soap? Healds used his snips to cut the legs off one, leaving it hobbling on six, then five, then three. Down to two, it fell over wriggling. We thought about letting it starve then decided to burn it.
Operation Iron Bullet got underway. National Guardsmen and Iraqi workers came to load our bunkers’ munitions onto trucks for transport to AHA Taji.
We were issued Humanitarian Daily Rations to give the Iraqis. Wrapped in tough yellow plastic, they were labeled A Food Gift from the People of the United States of America. The Iraqis brought their own lunches, flatbread with lamb and vegetables, and took the HumRats home.
They were a raggedy bunch, mustached and bony, wearing the same dirty clothes every day. We watched them with distrust and curiosity. Sergeant Chandler was the exception. Tasked with ferrying the work crews back and forth and guarding them during their shift, he got friendly. He ate their flatbread, gave them extra MREs, and bought their old dinars and army badges. Soon we did too. We bought the Pepsis they kept on ice in little coolers.
We captured a camel spider and a scorpion and Lieutenant Krauss announced a match. We fought them that night in a water bottle with the label peeled off. We cut the top off the bottle and cut another top off another bottle so it fit over the first like a cap. Several joes came to watch, huddled around us, and we dumped in one then the other. The camel spider skittered down to one end. We tilted the bottle so the scorpion fell on him.
Zang! went the black stinger. Zang! Zangzang! We cheered and shouted as the spider curled in death.
The next day, we fought this scorpion against another scorpion and he won again. The crowd multiplied and the shouts got louder.
The following day, though, our champion seemed sluggish. We were concerned. Did he need water? Was he depressed? We fretted and urged him to keep up his strength. We asked Healds but he snarled, “Dammit, I’m a medic, not an entomologist.”
That night we fought our hero against another camel spider, this time in a new arena. We took the apple crate I’d made into a chessboard and turned it right side up, covering it with a sheet of acetate. It was delicate work: one person held the arena and another the acetate and a third the water bottles caging our gladiators, then we dumped them in one by one, sliding back the cover, shaking the warrior in, fixing the acetate quick. The second fighter was always trickiest.
Our champ beat the new spider handily and in honor of his string of victories we dubbed him Saddam. The next day, however, his stupor worsened, even though we’d left him the spider’s carcass to eat. We had another fight that night, between him and a new, very large camel spider, but he was too sick or listless to attack, and since the camel spider’s jaws couldn’t pierce his thick exoskeleton, the fight was a draw. We doused both in gas and lit them up. The scorpion burned slow, sadly inanimate, but our camel spider ran, a skittering ball of fire, and crumpled outside the hooch. We cheered.
We staged more matches, got good at it. The scorpions were viciously territorial and fought both each other and the camel spiders, but the spiders for all their fierce appearance were comparatively irenic: they couldn’t stand up to those black stingers and wouldn’t fight against each other, no matter how much trash we talked. Scorpions were both rarer and harder to catch, so after our first lucky string of fights the battles grew infrequent. When we got a scorpion we fought him against camel spider after camel spider until he died in captivity or was killed by another scorpion. The winner we named Saddam.
successful combat operations in urban areas
require skills that are unique to this type of fighting
The radio crackled: MPs requesting assistance, moving in on a suspected cache, needed backup, wanted us, four or five humvees ASAP. The assault in two-zero mikes.
I threw on my battle rattle and ran into the CP, where Captain Yarrow, Lieutenant Krauss, and Sergeant First Class Perry s
tood pondering the sat-map.
“I think you can go out Gate 1 and down this road here, past, uh, what are those, houses?”
“Some kind of building.”
“Past those houses, right, and you can turn down this road over the canal.”
“Is that a bridge?”
“It’s uh, I can’t tell.”
“Can we go around?”
“Around the canal?”
“I mean, you know, a crossing.”
“You can go through BIAP but we’d uh, we’d need to get that route from somebody. I mean, we don’t know. And it’d take forty-five minutes at least, just to get there, never mind the site.”
“So down these roads here?”
“One of them must have a bridge.”
“Sir, we should roll,” Sergeant First Class Perry said.
“Can we take the map with us?” Yarrow asked.
“It’s mounted to the wood, sir,” Lieutenant Krauss told him. “And it’s too big.”
“Maybe we can fold it up.”
“It’s the only map we have, sir.”
“Sir, we should go.”
“Yeah, fine.” He turned to me. “Wilson, you see this?” He pointed at the map.
“Roger, sir.”
“That’s where we’re going. We go out Gate 1, we take the second left, then the second left after that. That should take us over the canal.”
The smudge of tangled gray resembled a crushed spider.
“Roger, sir.”
We headed out, headlights blazing, five humvees fully loaded. “Weapon status red,” the BC called, chambering a round in his nine mil and grinning. “Lock and load!” My rifle’s bolt slid forward with an exhilarating clack.
We rolled through the night past the first huts and trees and took the second left onto a dirt road bordered with thick vegetation. I strained to catch the twitch that would warn us of imminent attack.