The Nymphos
Of Rocky Flats
Mario Acevedo
CONTENT
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Dedication
Para mi hermana Sylvia,
por sus años de apoyo y fe
Many thanks to Diana Gill at HarperCollins, and to her diligent assistant, Will Hinton. A special note of gratitude to my agent, Scott Hoffman of PMA Literary and Film Management, Inc. for listening to my elevator pitch—while in an elevator—and then agreeing to give my manuscript a read. And to his colleague, Peter Miller, for his support. I couldn't have gotten this far without the wisdom and camaraderie offered by my friends in the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers. I owe much to my fellow critique members—many of whom have come and gone over the years—with special thanks to Jeanne Stein, Tom and Margie Lawson, Sandy Meckstroth, Jeff Shelby, Heidi Kuhn, and Jim Cole. Mil gracias to Tanya Mote and Anthony García of El Centro Su Teatro for their encouragement and amistad. To my family who has always stood beside me: my Tía Angélica; siblings Sylvia (and her partner Janet), Armando; my late sister Laura; and my sons, Alex and Emil.
Chapter 1
I DON'T LIKE WHAT Operation Iraqi Freedom has done to me. I went to the war a soldier; I came back a vampire.
Two weeks after President Bush stood on the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln and declared "Mission Accomplished"—victory over Saddam Hussein—we in the Third Infantry Division were still ass-deep in combat along the Euphrates valley. Tonight we were after fedayeen guerrillas in a village south of Karbala.
My fire team hunkered inside the troop compartment of our Bradley fighting vehicle. Dirt sifted through the open hatches above. Each of us wore forty pounds of gear like a hide—armor vest, helmet, radios, protective mask, lots and lots of ammo and grenades—under which we marinated in a greasy funk. Days of grinding mechanized combat saddled us with a fatigue as thick as the grime caking our weary bodies.
Each of us had bloodshot eyes and was queasy from bombardments delivered danger-close. Our artillery, the air force, and the navy demolished entire city blocks while we waited across the street. Our officers joked that we were smiting the enemy with an ass-kicking of biblical proportions.
We'd get the warning, drop low, cover our ears, and open our mouths to equalize the pressure. The blasts bounced us off the ground. Our eyeballs rattled in their orbits. Dust smothered us. Concussion from the bombs would slam into my belly, and I felt like I'd gotten run over by a parade of Buicks.
A painful spasm twisted my insides. I didn't tell anyone that I had started pissing blood. If I were evacuated, who would take care of my men? It was my duty to get them out of this shit-hole alive and in one piece.
Our Bradley veered sharply to the left and right as if following a rat through a maze. The abrupt movements jostled us in the darkness of the troop compartment.
Machine-gun fire rattled along the steel-armored skirt. My jaw clenched. The worst part of war was that everyone played for keeps.
Our Bradley clanged to a stop. The turret basket swiveled to the left. The 25mm cannon answered the enemy with a comforting wham, wham, wham.
Staff Sergeant Kowtowski dropped from his seat in the turret basket. He flicked on the flashlight clipped to his armor vest and a blue-green glow illuminated my team's anxious, dirty faces. Kowtowski pulled aside the boom mike of his crewman's helmet and yelled. "Gomez, when you un-ass, lead your team to the left. There's a Humvee with the lieutenant."
"Roger," I yelled back. He could have told me this through my radio but I think he wanted to look at his men one last time in case he never saw us alive again. Softhearted bastard.
"Good luck," Kowtowski shouted and turned off the flashlight. He climbed back into his seat. The Bradley groaned forward. The turret machine gun let loose and joined the chorus of staccato blasts from the Bradleys flanking us.
I knelt against the ramp and held a strap to steady myself. Private O'Brien readied his M249 machine gun and looped the belt of ammunition over his left arm. The other men in the team crowded next to me, all of us a tight, warm ball of fear.
The Bradley halted. My shoulder banged against the hull. The ramp winched open. We ran out, our heads scrunched into the neck wells of our armor vests. My index finger reached across the trigger guard of my carbine.
Our Bradley was parked close to a long mud-brick wall, the front of a lopsided row of houses that stretched across the block. The other Bradleys from our platoon blocked the intersections before and behind us, standing guard like immense war elephants. Garbage littered the street. The night air was filmy with dust. Slivers of light escaped from shuttered windows.
We stayed behind cover, squeezing between the Bradley and a flaking plaster wall as we moved toward the Humvee.
From the top of the Humvee, the machine gunner behind an armor shield aimed a searchlight at the front door of a home. In the cone of light, the lieutenant and a gaunt Iraqi interpreter banged on the wooden door. The harsh light reduced their forms to broken silhouettes.
The interpreter twisted the doorknob and beat the door harder as he yelled frantically in Arabic. His tense voice revealed fear, not anger.
"Enough," the lieutenant shouted, "we're not here to sell Avon." He drew his pistol and pushed the interpreter aside. The lieutenant aimed his automatic at the keyhole below the doorknob.
O'Brien and I crouched beside the lieutenant like a pair of twitching junkyard dogs waiting to attack.
The lieutenant fired once. The knob flew away in a shower of splinters. He reared back and kicked the door open to the shrieks of female voices.
We sprang forward and panned the room with our weapons.
Three Iraqi women huddled like frightened birds in one corner. Their ashen faces hovered above trembling hands. They clutched black shawls to their throats. Were they a mother and her daughters? They eyed us fearfully, their gazes fixed on the night-vision goggles clipped to the front of our helmets. Rumor was the Iraqis thought the goggles gave us X-ray vision and we could see through their clothing.
A swaying electric bulb lit the room. Shadows danced across the walls. Broken furniture, loose plaster, and paper lay scattered over a threadbare carpet.
The interpreter entered and was followed by the lieutenant. Pistol in hand, he yelled at the interpreter and the women. "Why didn't you open the door? Where are your men?"
The interpreter turned to the women. When they heard his Arabic, they surrounded him, gesturing and screaming angry questions. The oldest woman gave the best performance, repeatedly pressing a hand to her forehead and swooping her other arm at the ruin in her home.
An explosion shook the house. We ducked against the closest wall. The women dropped to the floor with practiced agility. Dust trickled from the ceiling.
The lieutenant answered his radio and then hollered. "Sergeant Gomez, we got contact. Get aroun
d back ASAP."
No shit, we got contact. My team dashed into the next room, tramping over unmade beds and knocking over dressers. There was a flimsy wooden door along the back wall that I busted open.
We emerged into an alley—barren and spooky. Reaching to the front of my helmet, I flipped the night-vision goggles down over my eyes. A greenish image materialized inside the lenses, a fuzzy picture of a dark background cluttered with bright abstract shapes.
Hustling to what remained of a brick wall, I lay prone amid the rubble while my team took positions alongside.
The lieutenant whispered excitedly over the tiny earpiece of my radio. "Four, maybe six fedayeen dropped into a canal about fifty meters past the alley." He ordered me to take my men to the berm overlooking the canal while another team flushed the fedayeen toward us.
We crept down the slope to the canal bank, our reflexes primed as we expected the enemy to open up at any second. I went up the berm first and snaked on my belly to the top. My heart thumped so loud I was afraid the enemy would hear it.
O'Brien startled me when he groped at the dirt to lie down behind his M249. His eyes reflected the dim green light coming from the back lenses of his night-vision goggles. The rest of my team joined us on the berm.
"How many of these guys do you think we gotta kill before we can go home?" O'Brien whispered.
"I'm pretty sure it's all of them," I answered.
"Too bad they don't stay in one place. This war would be over that much sooner if everyone cooperated."
From the depths of the image in my lenses appeared four figures, moving like specters along the muddy bank of the canal. My breath quickened.
The enemy was close enough to see that they carried equipment over their shoulders. Explosives perhaps? Rocket-propelled grenades—RPGs? They moved haltingly and whispered in Arabic. Their implements clinked together.
The lieutenant blurted over the radio. "Get ready."
In a quiet voice, I alerted my team. As one, we shouldered our weapons and curled index fingers over triggers.
A machine gun to my left growled, spewing a cascade of red tracers. O'Brien opened up. An M203 barked, lobbing a grenade into the center of the enemy.
We caught the Iraqis in a thick crossfire against the bank of the canal. The four intruders withered under a hail of tracers and the white flash of grenades exploding among them.
I fixed on the falling bodies and fired quick bursts, nailing each one in turn.
The lieutenant's loud voice sang over the roar of our guns. "Cease fire, goddamnit."
We released our triggers, the blasts from our guns ringing in my ears. The spent brass casings still whirling in the air pinged on the ground. An incandescent swirl of smoke rose from the hot, glowing barrel of the M249.
I flipped the goggles up from my eyes. My heart pounded in euphoric victory. The moment was exhilarating, my senses taut as a trip wire.
I could hear the smile in O'Brien's voice as he said, "Damn, that felt nice."
A wail rose from one of the bodies sprawled at the water's edge. Not a man's cry but the shriek of a girl, a horrible noise that told me my life would never be the same again.
The lieutenant and three other men crept around the berm and gathered around the fallen bodies. I pushed up to my feet to join them, the girl's wail tearing at my nerves.
The lieutenant produced a flashlight and swung its blue-green beam over the area.
A girl in a knee-length dress lay face up on the dirt. She looked maybe twelve years old. Screaming, she stared at us, her eyes so wide with fright that her pupils seemed to hover above the whites of her eyeballs. Her thin legs pumped at the ground as she tried to push away from us. Her right hand covered her belly. Blood seeped through her fingers.
Two women in black robes lay beside each other, mouths gaping, arms and legs ragged with ugly wounds. Each woman rested across a pole. Ropes lay twisted from the ends of the poles to plastic jugs.
An Iraqi with mustache, beard, and a checkered headdress squirmed on his back, wheezing. His eyes were shut in a grimace of pain.
"Oh God, oh God," one of the soldiers sobbed, "what have we done?"
O'Brien kicked the plastic jugs and his voice broke. "They were just hajis trying to get water."
Other soldiers had killed civilians by mistake. The bad breaks of war, I'd thought at the time. Now that I'd done it, the earth seemed to heave beneath my boots. I became dizzy and fought the urge to throw up.
The Iraqi man raised an arm and blindly called, "Ani."
The girl pulled herself toward him, crying out.
The man's arm dropped. His face slackened.
The girl shrieked louder, realizing that she was alone, wounded, and surrounded by us, a gang of assassins.
"Ah shit," the lieutenant kept repeating. He took off his helmet and ran a trembling hand over his burr cut. He called the company commander over the radio.
After a brief, tense exchange, the lieutenant released his radio mike. His shoulders drooped as if the world had landed on him. "We gotta evacuate her ASAP."
I yanked open the first-aid pouch attached to my armor vest and snatched the bandage. "Somebody give me a poncho. Now."
I tore open the plastic wrapper, pulled apart the ends of the bandage, and knelt beside the girl. She shrank from me, her face pale with terror.
We unfolded O'Brien's poncho and tried to coax the girl onto it, but she kept scooting away. O'Brien grabbed her hands and held them in a corner of the poncho while another soldier clutched her feet.
I had to expose the wound and drew my bayonet to cut her blood-soaked dress across the middle. Howling maniacally, the girl whipped her body against the poncho before going limp. She whimpered in Arabic. It wasn't enough that we had shot her in the belly and slaughtered her family, she must have thought, now we were going to rape her as well.
Blood flowed from a hole beside her navel. I pressed the gauze pad against the wound. Her warm blood soaked my hands. I reached under her tiny waist to tie the ends of the bandage around her.
How could this have happened? I knew what I had seen through the goggles. How could I have been so wrong?
We carried the girl away from the canal, her cracking voice echoing across the desolation. The night disintegrated into a dismal blur.
O'Brien slowed and tugged at his end of the poncho. "Hold up."
We shuffled to a halt. A rivulet of blood poured from the poncho.
We laid the girl on the ground. O'Brien put his fingers on her throat. "Tell the medics not to bother." He crossed himself.
Grief wracked my body. I felt pain from the bottoms of my feet to the inside of my skull. The agony squeezed my heart, compressing so hard I thought it would burst.
White tracers splattered around us. Jolting with terror, we dove and scattered. The bullets hunted us. One thumped against my armor vest. Another slapped the carbine from my hand.
RPGs exploded around me, knocking the helmet from my head. Dirt pelted my skin. My ears rang from the concussion and for what seemed like an instant, I blacked out.
Dazed, I pushed myself off the ground and staggered painfully to my feet. The fighting had stopped. I called to my team but saw that I was alone, surrounded by the bodies of the Iraqi civilians we had killed.
Where was my unit? Had they left me for dead? With trembling fingers I clutched a grenade. The silence betrayed nothing; even the enemy was gone.
I hobbled to the top of the bank, shivering like a frightened, wounded animal. At the far end of the alley, a ball of fire consumed the Humvee. Flames jumped from the roofs of the houses. Gulping for breath, I tasted ashes and fear.
I turned to my left, as if following a meridian that pointed the way to safety. Picking my way through the rubble of the brick wall, I limped for the closest dwelling.
A strange force pulled me and I stumbled over debris littering the threshold. Smoke clouded the interior, rolling up the walls and escaping through a hole in the ceiling.
; I crept to a window. I stayed hidden inside the gloom and glimpsed outside. The canal twisted below like a piece of beaten pewter. On the banks lay the forms of the Iraqis. The girl's dress shimmered against the dark earth.
Her blood glistened on my fingers. Bloody handprints stained my trousers. Confusion and shame coiled around me. I felt as if my uniform were strangling me.
I was no hero.
I was a murderer.
I pulled at my collar. We'd been sent here to kill the enemy in the name of freedom, and instead we had massacred an innocent family. Our great cause was a sham. I didn't want anything more to do with this stupid war.
Smoke drifted through a door leading to another room. The force that had drawn me here led me to the door.
In the next room stood a man tending a flame, poking a long stick at the coals piled on the dirt floor. He wore a tattered vest over a dirty robe. His head turned toward me, a mustache, beard, and bushy hair outlining a drawn face.
His eyes shone like those of a wolf, two red shiny disks. My reflex was to flee, but his gaze held me with a power that reached through my eyes and seized my thoughts. His will became mine.
He commanded, "Come here."
His voice came from inside my head. It was not in Arabic, nor in English, but was a soothing tone that cut through my delirium to promise relief from despair.
"You need no weapon."
I let the grenade drop, not caring if the pin still secured the safety lever. I approached with my hands raised, my fingers mottled with the blood of the Iraqi girl.
The stranger grasped my hands and brought them to his face, smearing my dirty, bloody fingers against his cheeks and nose. "Nothing is as precious as the blood of the innocent." He put a hand on my shoulder and stared into my eyes. "It is this girl's blood that torments you. Why?"
His question pumped more anguish into me. I choked on my words. "I didn't mean to kill her. It was a mistake. I didn't know. I was wrong."
"You are a soldier. You kill. That is your job."
"My job isn't to kill the innocent."
The stranger stroked my neck with the back of his hand as if what he desired was within my throat. I wanted to recoil in revulsion but this strange, hypnotic trance overpowered my instinct to escape.
The Nymphos of Rocky Flats Page 1