by Roy Scranton
“Turn down here,” the BC said.
“That’s the first one, sir.”
“The what?”
“You said the second turn.”
“I what?”
“You said the second turn.”
“Hold on. Stop.” He got on the radio. “Crusader CP, this is Crusader Six. Will you check the map here, we’re at the first turn on the road but I think it’s where the second turn should be. Can you verify?”
“Crusader Six this is Crusader CP. It’s, uh, difficult to determine exactly.”
“Crusader CP, this is Crusader Six, yes or no. Yes or no. Do I turn down this road or not?”
“Roger, Crusader Six. Go for it.”
We crept down the alley. Out of the vegetation on the left rose a stone wall eight feet high. On the right more vegetation and a drainage ditch and, further back, more walls, surrounding houses with brightly lit windows. The road narrowed. The wall closed in and on the right branches scratched at the windshield.
“Keep going,” said Captain Yarrow.
Up ahead a donkey cart stood against the wall with a donkey tied to it. The road widened slightly, and on the right a driveway ran over a culvert and back into the palms about ten yards to a large, well-lit house. Just past the donkey, the road swung left around an angle of wall.
The donkey brayed: ahhhhhweeyhornk-yhornk.
“Can you get by?”
“Roger, sir.”
“Keep going.”
I passed the cart, feeling the dirt at the edge of the ditch crumble under the truck’s wheels, and slid along slowly, closer and closer to the donkey now backing against the wall, panic flashing black in his eyes. The truck’s front bumper brushed his trembling flank.
Ahhweeyhornk!
“We got people! I mean contacts!” Sergeant Chandler shouted.
I looked back at two Iraqis in robes standing in the driveway, smoking cigarettes and watching us. Sergeant Chandler trained his rifle on them.
“Watch the men, Sergeant! Wilson, watch that donkey!”
Ahhweeeeyhornk-a-yhornk-a-yhornk!
I edged the truck forward, brushing against the donkey’s ribs. The truck behind followed close. I swung slowly around the corner of the wall. The road ended in a ditch. I stopped and looked at the humvee behind pressed against the braying donkey.
Ahhweeeeeeeyhornk!
“Fuck!” Captain Yarrow shouted. He got on the radio: “Crusader Attack elements, this is Crusader Six. Head back up to the, uh, back to the last route change, over.”
Captain Yarrow and Sergeant Chandler got out. Lieutenant Juarez came up. The donkey kept braying and Sergeant Chandler kept his rifle trained on the smoking Iraqis. Yarrow and Juarez traded heated whispers while the humvees behind us backed slowly down the road.
The BC slapped the rear of the truck to get my attention and started backing me toward the culvert and the driveway, which, it turned out, wasn’t wide enough.
“Are we backing up?” I shouted.
“We’re turning around.”
“I can just back up, sir.”
“You’re turning around, Wilson.”
Okay. I watched the mirror, the back tires, the BC’s hand signals, the wall on my left, the front bumper of the truck, and the increasingly freaked-out donkey all at once. The beast hopped up and down, convulsing, hooves stamping furiously. The bumper dragged against his rump.
The BC scowled and led me onto the driveway. The left rear tire started sinking. I couldn’t swing the truck any tighter without smashing the donkey, and if I kept on like this I’d slide into the ditch. The BC swung me back, though, and farther, the left side sinking deeper and deeper. Just when I thought we couldn’t go back any farther, the donkey maybe a foot in front, braying crazy-eyed in my headlights, the BC had me stop and turn hard left and pull forward. I went ahead until the brush guard rubbed the donkey’s ribs. The BC backed me up again, this time to the right, then forward again, again left. Awheeeeeeyhornk-a-yhornk-yhornk! Four more times, tight back and forth, the back end sinking, the donkey braying, and at last we got the truck turned around. I pulled forward, scraping the cart with a creak.
The BC and Sergeant Chandler mounted up, and we rolled back to the rest of the convoy. Yarrow called up Lieutenant Krauss and chewed him out for giving us bad directions.
•••
We took the second left. The next road was wider and ended in the overgrown courtyard of an abandoned building. We stopped and the BC called Lieutenant Krauss on the radio and yelled at him.
“This is the second turn,” Captain Yarrow shouted.
“Uh, roger, Crusader Six. You check behind the building?”
“Yes. This is it. It’s fucking palm trees. Look at the map again. Are you looking at the map?”
“Roger, sir. The map’s right here.”
“So you’re looking at the fucking map?”
“Roger, sir.”
“Then you can see. It doesn’t go anywhere. It just stops.”
“Roger, sir.”
“So why the fuck you send me down here if you can see it just stops? What the fuck, Lieutenant? Can’t you read a fucking map?”
“Roger, sir.”
“Holy Christ. We’re sitting out here like fucking . . . sitting ducks, and those MPs need us, they could be dying right now, and you can’t even read a fucking map!”
“Sir.”
“What, Lieutenant?”
“Sir, I think if you go back to the main road, turn left and stay to the right, break, just keep to the right and you’ll come to some buildings, and keep to the right of those, break, there’s a road that goes between the buildings and, uh, break, it looks like a small canal, break. Now you stay on that road until you get to another bunch of buildings, break, then take a left and follow that for, uh, break, a kilometer, and there should be a bridge over the big canal. How copy, over?”
“Stay to the right, go left, go over the bridge.”
“Roger.”
“Alright, Crusader CP. This better fucking work.”
We passed more houses, lights burning bright in the darkness, more men standing in courtyards staring. Children watched from balconies. At the next turn, we went right and Lieutenant Juarez’s team went left and we rolled down the alley to what looked like a cul-de-sac.
“There, there!” the BC shouted, pointing to a gap between a house and a small canal. “That’s the road.”
“We can’t get through there, sir,” I told him. The path was no bigger than a walkway.
“Don’t fucking contradict me, Specialist! Drive down that road!”
Grinding teeth, I poked the truck into the alley. The right side dipped precipitously down the canal’s bank. Left tires against the wall, my right tires churning mud at the water’s edge, undercarriage dragging, I inched forward as the path narrowed and the slope steepened. I stopped the truck so I could shift into low-drive.
“Keep going! What are you stopping for!”
I eased the truck forward. The path narrowed and the right side sank deeper into ditch muck. Soon there wouldn’t be any path at all.
“Sir.”
“Fine, I see! Fine!”
I put the truck in reverse and backed out. Thankfully the drivers behind us had waited, so it was a straight shot back to the cul-de-sac. Mud flung up from the tires.
The BC called up Lieutenant Juarez. His team hit a dead end, too. The BC radioed Lieutenant Krauss and told him to ask the MPs for directions. We reformed the convoy and returned to the CP.
Lieutenant Krauss radioed just as we were coming in Gate 1 and told us the MPs had started their assault, but they still needed us. He told us they had a route that went around BIAP. We were to go through Checkpoint 7 and take the first right.
“Do you mean go in through Checkpoint 7 o
r out?” the BC asked.
“Uh, out.”
“Alright. Let’s roll.”
We drove out Gate 2 and headed for Checkpoint 7. Just before reaching the checkpoint the BC told me to turn off the road. We drove between two closed-up vendors’ shacks into a rough field of hard furrows. The humvee bumped up and down.
“I don’t think this is a road, sir.”
“Keep going, Wilson.”
We came to a low berm separating the field from a flooded pasture.
“Fuck,” Captain Yarrow said. “Alright, turn around.”
We got back on the road and went through Checkpoint 7. The BC had me hug the right side, searching for the route over the canal. We eventually hit a dirt road that led off into the dark. The BC told me take it.
Lieutenant Krauss radioed that the MPs had secured the site but still needed help. They were undermanned and unable to handle security, processing prisoners, and chasing down fleeing targets all at once. Captain Yarrow told Krauss we were on our way.
The road rose onto a wide berm running along a canal. We drove down one side until it stopped, then doubled back to a bridge we’d passed and crossed to the other. We followed the berms, a maze in bas-relief, not sure where we were going but definitely headed the right general direction.
Eventually we came to a dip where the road led off the berm and through a depression. We followed it down then up around a low hill onto another berm, lined on one side with concertina wire, running northeast by southwest along an even larger canal. This was the canal we had to cross. There was no way across. We stopped.
“That’s the house right there,” the BC said, pointing out a low, distant building surrounded by trucks. I looked with my NVGs: Martians making the green scene, maybe six hundred meters away.
We mounted up and drove until we came to a Bradley parked across the berm. Beyond the Bradley rose a wire-topped wall, BIAP’s outer perimeter. Captain Yarrow scowled. He got out to talk with the Bradley commander, who didn’t think there was any way across the canal from this side.
“You’ve gotta go around north,” he said, “through Gate 7.”
Captain Yarrow came back to the truck. “Head back to the CP,” he said. It was nearly midnight.
He radioed Lieutenant Krauss and told him find another route. Lieutenant Krauss said he thought he had one that went through Abu Ghraib, west along the highway, but that he had to show him on the map.
As we pulled through Gate 2, Lieutenant Krauss radioed and said the MPs had called off the request. We pulled up to the CP and Captain Yarrow ordered senior leadership into the hooch for an After-Action Review. Everyone else was dismissed.
I unloaded my rifle, stripped my battle rattle, and bummed a smoke from Healds. We had little to say. The whole thing was too dumb. All I could think about was how soon I’d take off my boots, crack open my cot, and rack out.
Halfway through our smoke, Lieutenant Krauss came out and started digging in the humvee, at first leisurely then with growing panic.
“Wilson, you see the BC’s sidearm?”
“No, sir,” I said. “Why?”
“You sure?”
“Not since we rolled out. Why?”
“You might wanna get your gear back on.”
He ran back into the CP. Healds and I put our gear back on. A few minutes later the BC, Lieutenant Krauss, and some other soldiers mounted up and we took two trucks, C6 and C5, out the gate.
“Lock and load,” the BC said flatly, his empty white hands in his lap.
•••
He decided we’d start at the last place we’d been, so we drove all the way back through Checkpoint 7 out to the berm, going the whole way at walking speed so we could search the road with flashlights.
My helmet bit into my temples. Next to me, Yarrow’s neck was tight with tension, his mouth set in a grimace.
We drove up to the Bradley, inching across the sand, then came back. We stopped so Lieutenant Krauss could kick at shrubs and poke in shadows. We drove back to the field outside Checkpoint 7 and parked in the furrows, policing them on foot. Please, I prayed, somebody please attack us.
We drove back to the other side of BADW, back among the houses, scanning the ground at a creep. The moon had set. It was after three. I was too tired to care anymore. We stopped in the cul-de-sac and searched the ditch on foot. The Iraqi men came out to watch us again.
We drove back down the alley with the wall on the left and the vegetation on the right, the first place we’d gone, and there, next to the donkey cart, was the Battery Commander’s pistol, its lanyard splayed in the dust. It still had a round chambered.
The BC smiled as he holstered his sidearm. “Good work, men. Let’s head home.”
Prerecorded bugles pierced the dark. “Crusader Rock!” Mondays and Wednesdays out the kaserne gate, running up past the Edelsteinminen into the wooded hills or down through the cobbled streets of Idar-Oberstein. Muscle-failure Tuesdays, push-ups, sit-ups. Thursdays training. Fridays the “fun run,” the whole battery, straight down the hill to the Bahnhof then suffer back up.
Mondays were Preventative Maintenance Checks and Services, Tuesdays and Wednesdays Army business, Thursdays Sergeants’ Time Training, and Fridays motor-pool closeout. Clockwork.
Omens foretold action, if not an invasion at least serious bombing. Global drama, weapons inspections, secret reports.
Good. Yes. We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.
Meanwhile, we grunted through the week, waiting for Freitag, aching for pilsner. We’d start a little on Wednesday night and sometimes Thursday too, and by the weekend hit full swing: hefeweizen, fräuleins, döner and schnitzel, jäger and techno, hazy days, hazier nights. There was Café Carré down the hill, our informal battalion pub, and there were The Matrix and the Q and a dozen others, and oh, the herman girls. If you got sick of the barracks sluts at The Matrix, the ones who knew more guys in the unit than you did, you could always take the train to Köln or Saarbrucken or a cheap flight to Prague or Berlin. There was the Savoy, too, where for eighty euros you could relieve your tensions with a Thai girl, and Rot Frankfurt, only an hour away, a red-lit sex bazaar of six-story whorehouses, titty bars, and erotik-shops, jam-packed with Japanese businessmen. Or, like my roommate Villaguerrero, whose girlfriend was back home in Queens, kill the weekend with Grand Theft Auto.
Rumors said we’re deploying, rumors said we’re not. Ultimatums were issued. Bullwinkle said there’s no fucking way we’re going. Sergeant First Class Perry shrugged.
Briefly, after settling into the routine but before we knew we were going, I came back to myself. After the shocks of Basic Training and moving overseas, months of pure action, I began to see myself again and wonder who was this strange and stronger man in camouflage. The past clung fragile, like dying moss, barely felt. I kept in touch with my old ex-girlfriend but didn’t tell her about Julia and Sabine, didn’t tell her much—what was there to say?
What was I now, a soldier?
Fuck no. All a sham. I’d tricked them, and I’d ride these four years till I got out and made a new plan. I’d drink the pilsner, salute the butterbars, and hop to it, pretending I cared. I’d wear the stars and stripes on my shoulder and intone the soldier’s creed. Too easy.
We’re not going, Bullwinkle sneered. Of course we’re not going. That’s fucking retarded.
•••
The president made a speech. Captain Yarrow told us be ready. That Friday we had battalion formation. The colonel said we’d be in the second wave, relieving the units currently moving in, either to finish the war or more likely for SASO. We had a tentative ship date at the beginning of May. Things’d be hopping and popping till then, but the colonel insisted we’d all get a week’s leave.
We spent that weekend drunk—calls home to tearful mothers—tense discussions with wives and kids—and
Monday started the paperwork, packing, predeployment logistics clusterfuck. We got issued new gear. We got ceramic SAPI plates for the vests, but only two sets per battery. There weren’t enough desert boots. The DCUs were all the wrong sizes.
We watched the war on TV. We tracked Fox News, Nasiriyah and Basra, the Old Breed, Rock of the Marne, the Screaming Eagles. A few days later, we were told we’d have the next week for block leave. I called my ex-girlfriend and asked her if she wanted to come to Paris. I said I’d pay for everything.
squeezing the trigger releases the hammer,
which strikes the firing pin,
causing it to impact the primer
I woke to a dull sky, the air not yet warm. Early sun shot between massive apartment blocks to the east, gleaming off the turquoise dome beyond the north wall of Camp Lancer, gilding palm leaves, turning the streets to light. I crammed my patrol bag in my stuff sack and folded my cot.
I went out through the X-taped glass door to the balcony overlooking the courtyard. At the near end were two plastic chairs, and at the far end Captain Yarrow on his cot in a sleeping mask. I sat down, lit a smoke, and watched the sky brighten behind the mosque’s minarets.
The city slept. To the north, an orderly middle-class neighborhood, a grid of streets, houses and yards, cars parked in driveways, shaded sidewalks. Kids played soccer there. To the east and west, thoroughfares lined by shops, market stalls, and cafés. Farther east stood high-rise apartments, but to the west the neighborhood thinned to a desolation of half-built homes and vacant lots bordering the UN compound at the Canal Hotel. Beyond that lay the borders of Sadr City, a warren of low wires and bristling aerials ruled by Ali Baba and Shi’a militias. To the south, beyond the defunct cigarette factory, the city stabbed up: minarets and smokestacks, the Green Zone’s palace spires, Ba’athist icons, cyclopean dream-sculpture. In the distance a great blue egg hung against the sky like a fallen planet.
This was the only time all day the city breathed softly, evoking in the pale, slanting light imagination’s Babylon, letting me feel for a moment like the poet I’d once been.