House to House

by David Bellavia

  Fitts moves to me, his Mossberg 500 pump-action shotgun at the ready. “Whatcha got, bro? Whatcha got?”

  Fitts and I peer around into the street again, and I point out the insurgent. He’s taken another dozen steps toward us now, and is probably about fifty meters from us. He’s got a big bushy, mountain-man beard and is covered with filth. His clothes are smeared with gunk. His face is splotched with grime. He looks like a street person.

  Fitts and I observe him. I shoulder my M4. I’ll take the first shot, as Fitts’s shotgun has no night optics.

  Swish…swish…swish… footfalls in a hellish night. This man is about to die.

  It is unusual for me to be the hunter. Usually, we react to ambushes set by others. Usually, we use our skill and firepower to avoid being the prey.

  Sergeant First Class Cantrell loves to hunt. His mother back in Missouri has sent him a steady stream of hunting videos and magazines. Months ago, out of complete boredom, I started watching some DVDs with him. I’ve never hunted before, but these videos contain nuggets of useful information, some of which proved helpful during our counter-IED missions. Now I recall one video showing how the best hunters will make a little noise just before they shoot a buck. They do it because the deer will turn and present them a better target picture to shoot.

  I wonder if that will work now?

  The insurgent takes another half-dozen steps.

  “Hey,” I say in an almost casual tone.

  He stops and looks up, just like the buck in the hunting video. It gives me a magnificent feeling.

  I squeeze my trigger.

  A tracer streaks out of my barrel and disappears into his chest. A small puff of smoke, like exhaust from a cigarette, plumes from the hit.

  Did I get him in the lung?

  I squeeze the trigger again. The tracer hits him in the shoulder.

  His eyes bulge. It is his turn to be gripped by terror.

  I squeeze again.

  He keens in agony.

  One more. He howls, a long, mewling, pain-wracked scream.

  Yet he is still standing. The battery’s still in his hands. He’s too surprised to drop it and reach for his weapon.

  Fitts swings around the gate and rests his shotgun right atop my Kevlar helmet. His forearms jam down on my shoulders. He uses me as a damned tripod.

  The shotgun roars. A spurt of flame jets two feet out of the barrel, bathing the street in a red-orange glow. The fin-stabilized slug tears a chunk of the insurgent’s arm clean off.

  He racks another slug, levels the shotgun on my head again and fires. The slug blows a hole through the insurgent’s hip. He fires again and hits him in the other hip.

  Total silence. The jihadist drops the battery and sags into the street. He lays unmoving for several seconds. Suddenly, a SAW on our rooftop unleashes a burst into him. It is overkill. The bullets pockmark the street and pepper the corpse, which doesn’t flinch. Fitts and I have done enough damage.

  My grandmother always taught me to fight fair and never hit a guy when he’s not looking.

  Wrong, Grandma. That’s the best time to hit him. If you get a free shot, knock the corn out of his shit.

  “You see that?” Fitts asks, a big grin on his face. He feels the same way I do. He flicks his night vision up as I smile back.

  “I can’t fucking hear. Did you have to use me as your fucking tripod?” I ask.

  Fitts slaps me on the shoulder and just keeps grinning. “That was unnecessary, wasn’t it?”

  Ruiz appears and looks out over the street. “Whoa, awesome,” he reports.

  Sims calls down from the roof. “Nice shot.”

  “You saw him, sir?”

  “Yeah, I saw him.”

  “Why didn’t you shoot him, sir?”

  “I wanted to see where he went. Besides, he was no danger to us…at least not until he hooked that battery up.”

  I take another look down the street.

  Never hit a man when he’s down? Bullshit. Show me a better time.

  Combat distilled to its purest human form is a test of manhood. Who is the better soldier? Who is the better man? Which warrior will emerge triumphant and which will lie in a heap in the street? In modern warfare, that man-to-man challenge is often hidden by modern technology—the splash of artillery fire can be random, a rocket or bomb or IED can be anonymous. Those things make combat a roll of the dice. Either you die, or you don’t; your own skill doesn’t have a lot to do with it. But on this street and in these houses, it can be man-to-man. My skills against his. I caught him napping and he died. That is how the game is played. Tomorrow I might be the corpse in a heap on the street. But tonight I am alive, and I rejoice in that fact.

  I scream at the top of my lungs. It is a victory cry. I am euphoric. I have killed the enemy and survived. Infantrymen live on the edge. We are hyperalert, hyperaware of our own mortality. It makes us feel more alive, more powerful. Death is ever-present, our constant companion. We can use it or be victimized by it. We either let the violence swallow us whole or it will drive us insane. There is no room for Chaplain Brown out here.

  As infantrymen, our entire existence is a series of tests: Are you man enough? Are you tough enough? Do you have the nuts for this? Can you pull the trigger? Can you kill? Can you survive?

  Yes.

  I feel loose inside, like my vital organs have been rearranged by the euphoria that consumes me. I scream again. Battle madness grips me. Combat is a descent into the darkest parts of the human soul. A place where the most exalted nobility and the most wretched baseness reside naturally together. What a man finds there defines how he measures himself for the rest of his life. Do we release our grip on our basic humanity to be better soldiers? Do we surrender to the insanity around us and ride its wave wherever it may take us?

  Yes.

  I embrace the battle. I welcome it into my soul. Damn the consequences later, I am committed, and there’s no road back.

  I cup my hands to my mouth and take a long breath. “You can’t kill me!” I rage into the night, “You hear me, fuckers? You can’t kill me! You will never kill me!”

  “Bell, chill the fuck out.” Fitts is crouched next to me, working a wad of dip in his cheek.

  Too late.

  I am the madness.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Doorways

  “Dude, you sound like a retard. Stop screaming already.”

  Fitts brings me back to reality. I quit howling. This is not the time to be a philosopher. Silence fills the street as I calm down.

  Fitts and I confer. We discard the idea of firing the rocket into the propane tank. The enemy knows we’re here; we no longer need to instigate anything.

  Footfalls down the street signal the enemy is on the move. We peer down toward the municipal building but see nothing. More footfalls. Glass crunches. It sounds like several people.

  “Are they coming at us, or running away?”

  “Shhh.”

  We listen. The footfalls grow distant.

  “Dude. You scared ’em off with your rant,” says Fitts.

  “Yeah. And the shotgun rounds you put into Johnny Taliban were what, supposed to lure them in?”

  Fitts glares at me, and I realize he’s pissed off by my display. “I’m just saying…nah, fuck it. Go ahead, scream like an idiot.”

  Ruiz comes up to us. Fitts’s shotgun work has rocked his eardrums as badly as mine. “WHAT? DO YOU NEED ME, SERGEANT BELL?”

  We shake our head no as Fitts spits a wad of dip on the wall.

  “Fitts, you’re filled with negativity. We need to have an intervention here. This shit motivates me. This is my joy. Remember the old days. It used to be your joy. Where’s that guy? Can he come out and kill terrorists with his pal?”

  “Sorry I don’t ooze with optimism. Getting shot repeatedly kinda took the fun out of it for me.”

  We’re no longer joking with each other, and I realize just how deeply April 9 has affected my friend. A moment ago, we’
d both been smiling over our kill. I took it too far, and now we’re both uncomfortable. It has highlighted the two directions we’ve gone since that day in Muqdadiyah. I love this job. Fitts doesn’t anymore, but he’ll do it because he believes in it.

  “Fitts, you’re different,” I stammer.

  He looks down at Ruiz, who is still scanning the street.

  “Let’s not have this conversation in front of Ruiz.”

  “Dude, he’s completely deaf. Seriously. Check it out. RUIZ. RUIZ.”

  Ruiz doesn’t respond.

  Lieutenant Meno shouts down from the roof, “What are you guys screaming about?”

  “Nothing, sir. We got it.”

  We grow silent. There’s a breach between Fitts and me now that didn’t used to exist. It is out in the open, and we’ve both acknowledged it. It leaves me puzzled and dejected.

  Our street is quiet. We return to business and decide to move south down the street and take over a house with a better view of the municipal building. Our tanks and Brads are still to our north, apparently unable to get through on any of the main roads. We’ll have to continue our advance without them. This makes both Fitts and I very nervous.

  A mech infantry company is only half-complete with just the dismounts. We fight as an integrated team with our tracks. We complement each other. They are our heavy support. We are their eyes and ears. It is a perfect balance, and to be most effective, we have to work together.

  Still, we must press ahead. We cannot let the insurgents fall back and regroup. We’ve grabbed a foothold in the city. Now we must exploit it and drive as deep as we can.

  I call for my Alpha Team leader. Knapp dashes up to me. Six foot one and about 205, he’s tough and rangy, with a cannon for an arm, the product of his years as a high-school quarterback. He joined the army in 2001 and made E-5, buck sergeant, in only two years, a phenomenal rate of advance. He’d been Brigade Soldier of the Quarter before we’d left Germany for Iraq.

  “Knappy, I want you to take down that house across the street. The big bitch.”

  “Roger, Sarge.”

  Knapp turns to his guys, gives a few quick orders, and moves to the back gate. Sergeant Hugh Hall, Fitts’s B Team leader, throws a grenade toward the municipal building. When it explodes, smoke and dirt swirl around the street. We fire a few 40mm M203 rounds for good measure. They blow up and add to the makeshift smoke screen. Misa steps through the gate and bowls another frag down the street. If anyone’s left down there, they’re either suppressed or blinded.

  Knapp slips through our door into the street, winds up, and slings a grenade clear over the front wall of our target house. A muffled thump follows. Overhead, Pratt and Lawson cover us with their heavy guns.

  Knapp now launches himself fully into the middle of the street. The man is all steel and guts. During a firefight in Muqdadiyah last August, he stood atop a building and poured hot slugs into a group of about twenty insurgents. Bullets and RPGs flew all around, but he never even flinched. He stood and took it, and dealt out much worse.

  He reaches the far side of the street. As he does, I urge the next group forward. Slapping helmets, I hiss, “Go! Go! Go!”

  Fitts’s squad follows us out of the courtyard. We dash across the street and into the compound of our target house. As I get close, I see Knapp frozen in the doorway.

  What the fuck, Knapp? Get inside the fucking house!

  The rest of the squad stacks up behind him, and though I try to stop, I careen into the men. We’ve got one big gaggle fuck right in the front yard, and we’re vulnerable as hell.

  “Get the fuck in!” I order.

  Knapp immediately counters with, “No! No! Get the fuck out! Get out now!”

  “Whaddya got?” I demand, still trying to get untangled from the rest of the squad now backing off from the entrance.

  He swings around and grabs my body armor. As the rest of the men back up indecisively, he drags me into the doorway.

  “Knapp, what the fuck….”

  “LOOK!” he roars.

  The first thing I notice are the wires. Wires are common all over the ruins we’ve traversed so far, but they are always dirty, torn, and dull in color. The wires I see inside this house are crisp and clean and bundled neatly with zip ties.

  That is not good.

  “GO! GO! GO! Get the fuck outta here,” I scream to my squad.

  A cluster of wires funnel through one wall, then fan out all over the inside of one room just inside the door like green and orange ivy vines. I follow a few with my eyes and see they end in undersized bricks. This puzzles me for a split second, then I realize the bricks are chunks of C-4 plastic explosive.

  Another group of wires runs to a pair of go-cart–sized propane tanks stacked along the nearest wall. More explosives are scattered around them.

  But the pièce de résistance, the stroke of insurgent genius here, is the centerline aerial drop tank sitting in the middle of the room. Designed to give MiG fighter jets extended range, it’s a fuel tank that looks like a misshapen teardrop. The insurgents have slipped garbage bags onto its tail fins. The nose has been removed. The wires disappear inside from there. Using jet fuel as a bomb is what caused the fireballs at the World Trade Center on 9/11. This tank makes one hell of a weapon.

  We could lose the entire squad—we could lose most of the platoon—right here, right now.

  I turn to Knapp. “Get back to the other house, now!”

  He grabs the other men and everyone careens back across the street. I’m left alone in the doorway, staring at this enormous booby trap. I’m horrified by the thought of what almost happened to my platoon.

  Fitts jogs to me. “What’s going on?”

  I’m so stunned, I can only point.

  He peers inside the house and flips out. “What the fuck is this? Holy shit!”

  “This is a BCIED, man.” Building-contained IED. “Fucking…building bomb.” I can’t even talk in complete sentences.

  “This whole block would go,” Fitts adds.

  We can’t let the shock overwhelm us. I struggle to regroup.

  “What the fuck is this, Bell? Who drags a fucking drop tank into a house?”

  This is as close as I have come to seeing Fitts flip out. It’s unlike him. In fact, it is usually Fitts who stays calm in a crisis while I flip out. In October, just before we learned of our Fallujah mission, the platoon was on a routine patrol. Specialist Michael Gross tripped on a branch and fell face-first into the dirt. When he pulled his head out of the turf, he saw a trip wire only a few inches from his eyeballs. It was connected to a land mine. Gross yelled at the tops of his lungs. The squad stopped as I shouted, “Freeze! Everyone freeze and turn off your equipment!” We discovered several more mines strewn around us. Immediately, I tried to go through the doctrine on what to do in a minefield.

  Fitts and his squad were directly behind our wedge. Fitts saw he needed to keep all of us calm, starting with me. “Listen, Bell,” he said in a controlled, mellow voice. “I understand what you’re doing. That’s fucking Hooah. But you don’t need to turn off all that shit. What exactly is going on?”

  “Dude,” I said getting even more excited, “this is a fucking minefield.”

  Fitts barked out, “Listen up. I need two SAW gunners pulling security at 9 and 3. A 203 looking 12. Light up anything outside our area. Everyone get probing back to the path. Look around you.”

  “Gross, don’t move yet. I am looking behind you.” I was starting to think straight again. Fitts had cleared my head in a stressful situation, as usual.

  “Fitts, we are being overwatched. You don’t put up an obstacle unless you are watching it.”

  “I know, that’s why I set up security. “

  I crawled behind Gross. He was able to get up and move out. After a while I started digging a small hole with my knife near the base of the mine.

  “Bell, we are clear to move back here. What the fuck are you doing?”

  “I am going blow this b
itch up.” I pulled a block of C-4 from my butt pack and placed it inside my little trench.

  “Let me get these guys outta here before you get us all killed,” Fitts replied.

  “I got this, man. You gotta trust me.”

  “You don’t know what the fuck you’re doing, Bell. Stop poking that danm thing with your fucking knife.”

  “We may very well all blow up, okay? That is a very real possibility. But I need to focus and you are not helping me to fucking focus,” I shouted in frustration.

  “What the fuck. You doing this from what? Reading books with Lockwald and the engineers?”

  “No, this is from their PowerPoint presentation. Remember? The one you said was a fucking waste of time. Well check it out, dude, this is an Italian toe popper.”

  “Just let me get these boys outta here,” Fitts protested again.

  Our soldiers crawled out of the minefield one by one. I looked around and realized that I was left alone. I began poking another small trench on the side of the second mine and planted another brick of the C-4. The next thing I knew, Fitts is laying on his stomach next to me, his shotgun at the ready.

  He locked eyes with me and casually asked, “You got a dip for me?”

  It was typical of the roles Fitts and I played with each other. When I flip out, he stays calm and cools me down. He keeps me in control when I’m on the verge of losing it. Similarly, when I push the envelope and take risks, he’s always there to stop me from going too far. Whatever my state of mind, whatever situation I get us into, Fitts is always there for me. But he never has a dip. The bastard.

  Fitts is very uneasy. I realize that I’ve got to be the calm one this time, at least to pay him back for what he did for us in the minefield. This role-reversal is not easy for me.

  I suck air and work at staying calm. I must think this through.

  What did we learn from the minefield?

  A minefield is an obstacle. The enemy places obstacles to slow infantry down and funnel them into kill zones. Kill zones mean they are overwatching the obstacle.

  Somebody must have eyes on this place.