by Roy Scranton
Mohammed waved the idea away. “Don’t be an idiot.”
“I’ll go with him. I can shoot, I can drive. I know the roads. We both know some English.”
“A fool and a cripple. What a team.”
“Mohammed, my friend, it’s only seventy-five kilometers. I’ll go visit your sister-in-law, drop off Qasim, and I can be back the next day or the day after. I have an old friend in Baqubah I’d like to check up on. Consider it a favor—to me. I want to see your nephew do the right thing. Let me help him.”
Mohammed frowned, remembering the day he’d picked Othman up from al-Amn al-Amm, the Directorate of General Security: his face bruised, teeth missing, wincing as he got in the car, but smiling and joking as if nothing had happened. They said goodbye soon after, Othman going into exile in Lebanon, Mohammed not knowing if he’d ever see his friend again. He remembered Othman reciting from the Qu’ran the day he left: “Does there not pass over man a space of time when his life is a blank?” This time felt different, but how could you know? And what could he do? A man must follow the recitation of his soul. Mohammed shook his head in resignation. “Fine,” he said. “Fine.”
Qasim thanked Othman and Mohammed, then ran upstairs to pack. The two older men said nothing for a long time, smoking in silence until Mohammed stubbed out his cigarette and stood up. “Bring the car back safe,” he said, “or Thurayya will kill both of us.”
The poet’s eyes gleamed. “Insha’Allah.”
babylon
Nothing is over: This is the story of a long-haired half-crazed Vietnam vet, harassed by small-town lawmen, lost on his one-man mission of vengeance. Back in the war, he was part of a ragtag team of misfit soldiers, hand-picked for a suicide mission to kill Hitler. Good and evil. He’s a downed fighter pilot. He’s red and white and blue.
This is the story of the sword. Gun. Dawn
patrols blacktop sit guided in a bad hundred feet drowned
gulf
military units added to the
brass shell dogs devour battle
so they too were made of vanity and 72 hours not from the stories of previous wars. Violence inflicted on the largest burden themselves, some of which depicted pyramids and the rest shocked of no-man’s land. Lee Marvin leads a ragtag gang of misfits through the hell of war and loss of innocence as they fight for freedom and America from the deserts of North Africa to the forests of Germany. He’s an idealistic young officer leading his all-black regiment on a suicide attack on a coastal fortress. No-man. Through me tell the story of one man’s rage and the razing of an ancient city. He’s an idealistic young officer charged with cowardice for refusing to send his men to their death on a suicide attack
new reports
electricity
widening the circle of direct blame for shooting it up my ass. On first setting eyes, alas, my son, harassed by small town artillery emplacements, a bridge no more. Night and day did I glory in misfits hand-picked and leads a ragtag bunch of strength to all in Troy both men and hell. From the glory. A young man discovers commando war nothing, for no one pilot develops a tenuous ragtag bunch of All-American right hand like a lizard but that’s not hell, a bunch of ragtag boots lying like getting my machine impression of his wife the flow I mean when I voted for hell, horses in administrative succession, running the Achaeans divide the fate DETAINEE-07’s allegations
a tale of courage and honor, loyalty, grace under pressure and the will to win. He’s a young, dedicated soldier sent up the river to kill a rogue agent. He’s a drunk, grizzled vet sergeant fighting bureaucratic bullshit to transform a ragtag bunch of misfits into a steely band of killers, leading them to glory in the assault on Grenada. The allegations of
this man alone, unsupported, allegations of abuse, his statements available, Peleus, for he is mightier than you. Nevertheless, intel interests dogs and vultures, and a load of grief would be lifted from my damage Iraq’s eyewitness reports, life, both Iraqis cried: The British Academy has committed Muslims. Like people attacking a library. Ragtag. A young glory. An Army Special Forces operative goes up the river. A young man joins the Marines and becomes a photographer and is sent to Vietnam and learns that war is hell is hell. War story. A retired Special Forces operative returns to Vietnam to rescue his POW buddies. This is the story of the Center in Washington D.C. where he practiced for conventions of war or rules had no way to confirm they were the war near equipment in civilian areas, maintaining Abu Ghraib largely with Iraqis of “no intelligence” a lot firmer, particularly his own military; a final atrocity exploited for detainees were meant to be “exploited for” many shops know coalition forces prisoners scooped up in this way soon flooded the keepers taken all the campaign on the harsh terrain of disadvantages nighttime sweeps gave Saddam 48 hours on the harsh terrain of detainees at Abu Ghraib whomsoever Allah overcrowding difficulties
the Iraqi Academy of physical abuse while stuck here
This is a story of we happy stuck here. This is the story of a ragtag bunch of misfits picked for a suicide mission to stuck here. A young man. From the ragtag clutches. A noble, professional Special Forces commando learns that war is young. A young hell and ragtag bunch of All-American misfits fight Japs in the South Pacific and learn war is war. A bunch ragtag of young ragtag learn the true meaning of discipline and camaraderie and war and war. A young maverick risks everything to save his father from the Libyans. A ragtag bunch of Australians go halfway across the world and learn war is is. This is the story ragtag young man.
Stuck here. Stuck here. This is the story of valor, duty, and the cost of war. A young camaraderie. This is the story of a young man who learns war always has a cost. A young wacky. This is the story of a wacky bunch of ragtag misfits trying to escape from Nazi prison. A wacky bunch of ragtag misfits running an Army hospital in Korea. A ragtag maverick valor war. This is the story of a young man’s war, the story of we happy few.
your leader will
control your fire
(operation iraqi freedom, 2004)
fear is not shameful
if it is controlled
The plane tilted on its side and through the window in the opposite bulkhead Baghdad whirled below, taking my stomach with it. Men and women in brown DCUs turned green as we spun plummeting in a banked spiral. The guy across the aisle puked in a bag and his buddy cheered.
We rolled against the sky, then at the last minute flopped flat and came in straight. The engines growled down into the final approach, and we dropped the last few inches slamming to the deck.
They downloaded our bags and we threw them in the back of a five-ton. The truck took us to a staging area. Contacting Battalion to arrange pickup, I was surprised by how eager I felt to see my fellow soldiers—I had to make sure they were okay, but as much as that I just wanted to see their faces. They understood. They knew this shit world we lived in, knew it all better than anyone I could talk to back in Oregon. I realized as well that I was itching to get back outside the wire. The berms, palm trees, and sand around me seemed not just familiar but comforting. Normal. I wanted to scan rooftops. I wanted shots fired. I wanted ninja women in abayas, hadjis in man-dresses. I wanted to hear and talk salaam a-leykum, ishta, uskut. I wanted my rifle.
It was hard to believe I’d just been back in the land of shopping malls and big hair, showing my ex-girlfriend photo after photo: this is my humvee, this is Captain Yarrow, this is Camp Lancer, this is the UN before, the UN after. How was it possible that just a few weeks ago I’d come down into Portland, rain drumming on the plane’s windows, feeling the war slip off like an old jacket?
When I got off the plane, there was my ex-girlfriend and another girl, an old friend, and we hugged and kissed and grinned. In the parking garage by the car, they lifted their skirts and showed off their matching Superman panties. My heart was full of love.
All the long ride home while the girls talked to me and each other, I s
canned overpasses for snipers and watched the shoulder for IEDs. I kept reaching back for my rifle, startled that I’d lost it, and eyeballed cars passing on 205, feeling spooked, thinking I need a drink, I need a smoke, how the fuck long do I have to do this alone?
Now, after weeks of being apart, she’d be there waiting for me.
Geraldo showed up in C7.
“’Sup, Wheat Thin.”
“Good to be home, Cheeto.”
“You missed a dope barbecue.”
“Anybody get killed?”
“Naw. Burnett some caught shrapnel from an IED. Like a thumbtack. Purple Heart’s tomorrow. You have yourself some fun?”
“I didn’t know what to do with nobody shooting at me. I got laid, though. Any word on redeployment?”
“Saying April.”
“April, huh?”
“What they say.”
“That’s like ninety days.”
“Ninety days be ninety days.”
On the way back to the CP, I watched the West Side DFAC go by and the road to Gate 5. The route I had run in the mornings and the fenced-off mosque. We passed Battalion Maintenance, the mini-PX, and the hemmet lot, finally pulling into our compound. I didn’t know whether to cry or scream or shit myself.
I got out and downloaded my gear. On my way to draw my weapon, I ran into Nash and Sergeant Chandler.
“What are you doing here, Sergeant? I thought you were getting out.”
“Yeah, so did I,” he said.
“What d’you mean?”
“Three days before my orders, I get fucking stop-lossed.”
“Say what?”
“Stop-loss. No-Movement Orders come down for all units in support of OIF. Nobody ETSes out of Iraq anymore.”
“What the fuck’s that mean? You don’t get out?”
“Not till we get back.”
“That is some fucked-up shit. But it’s only ninety days, right?”
“So they say. But enough about my troubles. How was leave?”
“Fucking-A, man. I ate everything. I drank everything. I got fucked. I saw the new Lord of the Rings movie, which was awesome. And this—you gotta check this out.” I dug through my backpack. “You and me, Sergeant, we’re Person of the Year.” I handed them the Time magazine with the 1AD guys on the cover.
“No shit.”
“Yeah. There’s a big article in there about how fucked up it’s been for 4-27.”
“I guess we’re too boring.”
“It’s weird man, coming back. At the Dallas airport, there was this line of flag wavers, and anytime anyone found out I was in Iraq, they got all serious and shit, started thanking me and telling me what a great thing it was I was doing. I didn’t know what to say. Like, hell yeah, fuck hadji! I mean, what the fuck?”
“Bet you got a lot of ass.”
“Sure, well . . . I was fooling around with my ex, but . . . if I’d wanted, there was definitely opportunity. I mean, what chick doesn’t wanna fuck a war hero?”
I left them with the magazine and went to draw my rifle. As I crossed the motor pool, I seemed to be walking through a dream. I felt too relaxed. Everyone else was depressed and hateful, just like I remembered, but the difference was me: I was okay. I could see our frustrated rage, our barely checked aggression, our loneliness, our desperation, and for the first time ever, I could see it without belonging to it. If I can just hang on to this, I thought, I’ll get through. Everything’ll be fine.
Later I talked to Bullwinkle and he said yeah, that lasts about three days.
when defending, or when temporarily halted
while making an attack, you must seek cover from fire
and concealment from observation
We hauled our gear into the new barracks at FOB Raptor: lines of squat, cinder-block rooms inside a dim, echoing, sheet-metal hangar. We were assigned four to. My roommates were Sergeant Chandler, Stoat, and Reading.
The best part was the latrine. Instead of porta-johns, we had an actual building. Gleaming mirrors. Linoleum floor. Toilet paper. Twenty stalls, separated by white plywood, with doors and flushing toilets. White porcelain sinks. Fourteen showers with curtains, drains, and high-power nozzles. Hot and cold running water.
We ranged the FOB with a quickness, reporting back to each other like kids scouting a theme park. There was a small PX, a hadji souvenir shop, a hadji coffee shop, laundry service with three-day turnaround, a hadji barber, internet café, hadji bootleg-DVD shop, hadji smoothie stand, gym with elliptical trainers, weight machines, and treadmills, and some outdoor volleyball and basketball courts.
Ninety days.
Too easy.
Our patrols weren’t difficult. Baghdad had calmed down over the winter. There was less shooting, fewer IED attacks, fewer random ambushes. We rolled through the same garbage-strewn, sewage-washed streets over and over.
Men stood before turquoise-tiled mosque doors, impeccably dressed, watching us go by. Little kids in pink pants waved. Old women in niqabs waved. Shopkeepers waved.
We had terps with us every day now. There was Anuman, an older guy with a short beard, once an economist; Big Joe, who wore mirrored sunglasses and a black leather jacket, who loved American TV and thought American women were “the hottest bitches in the world”; Qasim, a nervous, stick-thin math professor with a Scottish accent; and Ramana, who we called Bertha, a great surly mound of a woman who used to do something with computers. There were others we only met once or twice: Frick and Frack the dental students, Akbar the pimp, Ms. al-Radi the psychiatrist.
Life took on a dependable rhythm. We went to the internet café. We emailed friends and family. Reading and Cheese played Warcraft III. Other guys posted photos on Hot or Not and bragged about their ratings. I googled places to go on vacation, broke up with my ex, and ordered thick nineteenth-century novels from Amazon.
We blew our tax-free combat pay on CDs, digital cameras, portable DVD players, creatine powder, protein shakes, Maxim, and cases of Red Bull. On patrol we’d drive to the hadji market in the Green Zone, which had the best bootlegs in Baghdad. Little kids ran up shouting “Ficky-ficky DVD,” their hands full of porn.
A private in Attack Battery got killed by an IED. At the ceremony, we stood in formation while the chaplain read from the Bible and some soldiers got up and talked about what a great guy the dead kid was. Lieutenant Colonel Braddock stood and told us how important it was that we were doing the job we were doing and how important it was to bring democracy to Iraq, and most important, how we were defending American freedom from the terrorists who hated our way of life.
The bomb had gone off under the kid’s humvee. The charge had been buried in a pothole and covered with plaster of Paris, probably detonated by cell phone. One of the guys in Attack told me they left more of him stuck charred inside the truck than they put in the body bag.
“We’re fighting them in the streets of Baghdad,” the Colonel said, “so we won’t have to fight them in the streets of Jacksonville, Florida, or the streets of Galveston, Texas, or the streets of PFC Gabriel’s hometown of Culver City.”
Taps played on a boombox. Halfway through, the CD started skipping. Then somebody bumped it with his foot and it stopped.
do not move: la ta-ta-HAR-rak
do not resist: la ta-QAOWM
We set up Traffic Control Points, usually at night, where we pulled over random hadjis and searched their cars. The LT’s favorite spot was Checkpoint 15, an overpass spanning the main expressway along our route. On the north side it fed into a neighborhood, but on the south, the concrete dropped off twenty meters past the entrance ramp, making the overpass a one-way street and a low-traffic exit.
We set up on both sides to cover all the zones. Two guys stood at the top of the ramp with rifles and a high-powered flashlight. We’d flash a car and, once they pulled over, have them get ou
t and open the doors, the hood, the trunk, everything. While the hadjis stood in the dark by the side of the road, we dug through all their crap, searching for weapons, I guess, or maybe bombs or some kind of Axis-of-Evil, al-Qaeda spy shit.
We pulled over a van full of young women in hijab, driven by a middle-aged guy with an enormous mustache. He got out, but when Qasim explained that the women had to get out too, he shook his head.
“La. La,” he said.
“Naam, motherfucker,” I said. “They come the fuck outta the van. Everybody.”
The man said something to Qasim and something to us. Burnett hefted his rifle.
Reading said, “Look at all them bitches!”
Qasim explained: “These are his daughters. He says they cannot be seen standing by the side of road in the night like this. Is very bad. Okay?”
“No, not okay,” I said. “They all gotta come out.”
“It is very . . . ashamed for them,” Qasim said. “Is no good.”
“I get the one in blue,” Reading said.
“I don’t fucking care,” I said. “Everybody comes outta the van.”
Qasim said something to the man, who exploded in frustration, screaming in Arabic. I shouted back: “Those girls come the fuck outta the car, or we zip you. Got it?”
Qasim translated and the man glared at me, stomping his foot.
“Tell him,” Burnett said gently, “they either come out on their own, or we drag ’em out.”
“Tell him if they don’t come out, we’re gonna rape ’em,” said Reading.
“Shut up, Reading.”
“Tell him they come out on their own or we drag ’em out, alright?”