The Fighters

by C. J. Chivers

  “He got his leg blown off,” Daniel said.

  “No way,” Dustin answered. “No, he didn’t.”

  He called Worley’s mother. She told him Joe Dan had been hit in an ambush, lost one leg, and been shot.VI He was being treated but it was too soon to know many details beyond that he was alive. Kirby thought she spoke mechanically, as if reading a news report.

  This was the reason no one had answered his phone calls. Kirby’s mother did not want him to hear about Joe Dan while he was driving. She herself was shaken, unsure what to say or do. When she heard Worley had been wounded, the façade she had built for herself—that Dustin would be safe on board a ship—crashed down. Her first thought, loaded with anger at Joe Dan, had filled her with guilt: And he talked Dusty into doing the same thing!

  Daniel called to tell her that Dustin was home, and she rushed to the house and hugged him. She was crying. Her son was with the Marines, too. He had his uniform and combat kit in his pickup truck. But maybe there was something good in this, she thought. She told Dustin that this would be it. Joe Dan had lost a leg. The family had a casualty. That would be it. Families did not have two casualties in these wars.

  Dustin Kirby would be safe.

  Standing in their kitchen, listening to his mother, the news fresh in his head, Kirby saw it differently. The war was upon them, and he accepted his fate. Joe Dan was fucking Superman, he thought. If this happened to him, it’s definitely going to happen to me.

  * * *

  I. The base, when the Army lived there, was also called Dreamland.

  II. The military assigned its own names to Iraq’s roadways, often repurposing geographic names from back home—Tampa, Michigan, Chicago, and more. Troops rarely used, and often did not know, local highway numbers or names. Mobile was considered a MSR, or Main Supply Route.

  III. The Marines killed were Lance Corporal Derek Gardner, Corporal Mick Bekowsky, Lance Corporal Lamont Wilson, Lance Corporal Quinn Keith, Private First Class David Burridge, Lance Corporal Michael Allred, and Corporal Joseph McCarthy. The names of the Iraqi victims were not recorded by the platoon.

  IV. Two corpsmen who handled the tourniquet remember it differently. The description in the text is from Worley. Doc Meaney recalls a section of wooden dowel thinner than a broomstick, and no grenade pin but a ring from a Gatorade bottle.

  V. Two men died inside the Humvee: Sami (last name unknown), an Iraqi interpreter working with the platoon, and Corporal Christopher Ebert.

  VI. Official accounts and news reports of the ambush say that Worley was struck by small-arms fire after being wounded by the bomb. Worley himself is unaware of any gunshot wounds, and says these descriptions appear to contain errors.

  Confronted in 2004 by soldiers with complaints about their poor state of equipment, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had been dismissive. “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time,” he said. During 2005, the American forces in Iraq were slowly becoming better equipped. Heavier equipment and armor were being deployed, and new weapons and protective gear were in development. But American forces often remained overwhelmed. Many lived in large bases, yielding the cities and countryside to militants, who often operated unchallenged. Iraqis were to vote on a new constitution while the country slipped into sectarian war. The war in Afghanistan, where President Hamid Karzai assumed office in the fall, remained a lower priority, though the Taliban endured and was becoming more bold.

  FIVE

  * * *

  * * *

  DOWN SAFE

  Chief Warrant Officer Michael Slebodnik and the Air Cavalry War in Iraq

  “I am an American soldier.”

  SEPTEMBER 27, 2005

  East of Samarra, Iraq

  Forward Operating Base MacKenzie was a fortified compound around an airstrip in Salahuddin Province, a relic from Iraq’s military buildup under Saddam Hussein. During the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, when Hussein spent lavishly on his armed forces, the place was known as Samarra East Airfield. Yugoslav contractors built concrete hangars and bunkers beside the runway to protect the jets with which Iraq waged war.

  The American military arrived at its gate in 2003, after Hussein’s military was no more, settling in for occupation by moving into the old hardened shelters and erecting temporary housing outside. The place was spartan to the point of feeling oppressively grim—a mix of Eastern Bloc drab and plywood-and-prefab American haste, ringed by fences adorned with blowing trash. The Americans gave their outpost a cheery name, Camp Pacesetter, and made it a part of the network of bases in north-central Iraq from which soldiers began working on the country’s post-invasion recovery and reconstruction. The first months were manageable. But security conditions around the base soon tanked. During 2003, armed resistance rose outside the perimeter fence. Pacesetter, under constant watch, became besieged and a target for rocket and mortar attacks.

  Recognizing the change, in early 2004 the Army replaced the departing units with a cavalry squadron equipped with Abrams tanks and Bradley cavalry fighting vehicles—tracked troop carriers with armor and a chain gunI—and renamed the post Forward Operating Base MacKenzie, a designation more in tune with the dangers all around. MacKenzie had been the surname of an Army officer from American frontier history, General Ranald S. “Bad Hand” MacKenzie, who was credited with defeating recalcitrant tribes and instilling the rudiments of government during the Indian Wars of the 1870s. Adequately airbrushed, his history could inspire. One of his hands had been maimed in battle as a Union officer during the Civil War, but he returned to duty, short of fingers, and led soldiers through his second war, deep into another decade. Lost in the messaging of 2004 was an uglier resonance. After suffering more wounds, including a fall from a wagon that may have damaged his brain and perhaps an infection of syphilis, MacKenzie was deemed insane. He suffered through inglorious final years, all but forgotten. His nickname came to suggest ill fortune as much as grit. In occupied Iraq, it was an able shorthand for the soldiers’ lot.

  Forward Operating Base MacKenzie was a concrete-and-gravel island in a zone of baked sand. Located in a parched basin near the Tigris River, it offered an empty vista for soldiers to look out upon. Fine dust blew across its runway and worked its way into soldiers’ laptops, beds, uniforms, and eyes. When it rained, the dust morphed into batter-like mud. A northern section of the base, littered with unexploded bomblets from old American cluster-munitions strikes, was a cordoned-off no-go zone, lest troops be maimed or killed by their own bombs. Bloodsucking sand flies preyed on the concentrated soldiers; until troops treated their uniforms with permethrin, some fell ill with leishmaniasis, a parasitic disease that can cause lesions resembling leprosy, along with fever, anemia, and an enlarged spleen. Hussein’s old airstrip was a dump, one of the most unpleasant duty stations in Iraq.

  Chief Warrant Officer Michael Slebodnik landed a Kiowa Warrior scout helicopter on MacKenzie in late September of 2005. He was a soldier in Alpha Troop, Second Squadron, Seventeenth Cavalry Regiment, part of the 101st Airborne Division. The troop had ten Kiowas and forty soldiers, half of whom were pilots like Slebodnik. Its immediate role was to relieve another Kiowa troop that was rotating home, and to work with the First Battalion of the Fifteenth Infantry Regiment, which was running armored ground patrols in and around the nearby city of Duluiyah and trying to keep open the supply routes upon which MacKenzie’s soldiers relied.

  In his community’s jargon, Slebodnik was an “IP,” an instructor pilot, a senior member in the command who trained and evaluated younger aviators. He was thirty-six years old and had been in the Army since the day he graduated from high school in 1987 in Gibsonia, Pennsylvania, a rural town north of Pittsburgh. He fit one of the Army’s most successful and loyal profiles. A devotee of military history whose grandfather had been a navigator in a B-24 bomber in World War Two, he was a career soldier, a lifer who had never wanted another job. Alpha Troop was scheduled for a one-year tour, and Slebod
nik’s seniority would have him lead two-helicopter patrols, called scout weapons teams. Only the right-seater in a Kiowa can fire the aircraft’s weapons, and nothing forbade a senior pilot from flying left seat and allowing a younger pilot to lead a flight and control the weapons. But Slebodnik was known among peers for never relinquishing the right-side chair—or control of a Kiowa’s machine gun and rocket pod.

  Slebodnik had been to Iraq before as part of the Night Stalkers, the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, which worked almost exclusively with special operations units. An assignment to the 160th was highly respected, a stamp of Army aviator cred. But Slebodnik did not quite fit in. He disliked aspects of the unit’s stateside social life, including weekend carousing, and disliked even more that as a clean-living soldier he was expected to be a designated driver for others when they drank. In 2004, he left the 160th and was reassigned. His wife, Tanja, whom he married in 2003, was soon diagnosed with a viral brain infection. She suffered from seizures. It had been a busy and difficult year, a whirlwind of family and medical needs. Slebodnik and Tanja had each been previously married. He had three children, she had twin boys, and in 2004 she became pregnant. Their new son, Michie, was born on December 31. Slebodnik’s switch to the Cav allowed him to be more fully involved as a new husband and father. He was home at Fort Campbell when Tanja was diagnosed and as she convalesced, and was present for their son’s birth. He then had a run of months before returning to the war.

  The squadron put him in Alpha Troop, which he helped train before Iraq. Slebodnik could seem easygoing and even folksy, a balding man with a big smile and Western Pennsylvania accent, which led him to pronounce Washington “Wershington,” to the amusement of peers. He took the ribbing easily. He was religious and socially proper; unlike many soldiers, he could be painstakingly polite. His understated style belied his competitive streak. A dedicated runner, Slebodnik was determined to remain in top shape in the later years of his career, even as he joked with fellow pilots that he ran so that he could keep up with Tanja, who was more naturally athletic and lean. And he was deeply invested in the cavalry ethos. The Kiowa was an aircraft he knew intimately, and the latest variant, the D model, was the most lethal version the Pentagon had fielded yet. Across his community he was considered an aggressive pilot, someone who pushed the Kiowa hard, sometimes beyond its official limits, occasionally to the point of damaging engines. This intensity had roots fellow soldiers respected and understood: He spoke often of protecting the troops on the ground, no matter what. His call sign, Annihilator 21, fit the man.

  He arrived to Iraq harried. After leaving the States in the summer in 2005, Alpha Troop stopped in Kuwait and was waiting for a scheduled move north, when the soldiers were told to cease their preparations and hurry to MacKenzie. Much was rushed. Combat-loaded Kiowa helicopters can fly for about ninety minutes before needing to refuel. The troop’s journey was a series of hops over the desert from one refueling point to another, a linear tour of the archipelago of bases and outposts the Pentagon had built in Iraq, the unsightly public works project of a war in progress. They flew over a universe of plywood shacks, generators, fuel bladders, sandbags, fences, and blast walls. Much of it was disorganized and already falling into disrepair. MacKenzie matched the mess. He had just landed at the old airstrip, and was carrying equipment to his new living quarters, when he almost crashed through the top of a septic tank. Soon after, he wrote Tanja to tell her that the first walk across his base had included a near plunge into human waste.

  I fell in one foot in one foot out. The lid saved me from breaking ribs on the edge of the opening. Lucky for me the tank wasn’t full. Welcome to Iraq Mike. Smile. I didn’t get hurt.

  * * *

  Alpha Troop, one part of an Army reorganizing against an insurgency it had not expected to fight, was entering a confounding war. A briefing about Slebodnik’s new world contained the story of a stretched military force mired in an evolving conflict. In the first months of occupation, during 2003, the Americans at Pacesetter had stepped out to patrol the base’s environs, meet Iraqis who lived nearby, and encourage them to accept Iraq’s Washington-backed government. There were clear problems. The Coalition Provisional Authority’s de-Baathification order, issued in May 2003, stripped the government of an experienced workforce and barred trained officers and soldiers from further service. This disrespected almost an entire governing class, and freed the remains of an experienced military for guerrilla war. Official optimism still ran high, in part because the forces opposing the Pentagon’s project had started small, and in part because the military’s and the Coalition Provisional Authority’s internal and external messages emphasized reconstruction, political transition, and aid. But the picture was darkening. As dangers arose, the United States took steps intended to protect its forces, keeping troops inside bases and venturing out on short missions and limited patrols—a posture that ceded most of the country to armed groups and made many dangerous areas more dangerous still.

  By early 2004—when First Squadron, Fourth Cavalry Regiment rotated from Germany to MacKenzie—the armed groups had grown in numbers and skill. Their ranks included area tribesmen, former Iraqi soldiers, and foreign fighters who had traveled to Iraq in what they saw as the call of jihad. These combatants were firing rockets and mortars at the base, driving the Americans into bunkers and hangars and behind concrete blast walls. The base enforced an absolute blackout at night; any light was a potential aiming point for attackers and invited more accurate fire. Other dangers could not be readily avoided. The road from the big logistics base at Balad to MacKenzie passed through the small city of Duluiyah, a warren of single-story concrete buildings and alleyways where American soldiers and the local population mixed.

  Duluiyah was a Sunni town. Many of its people had been displaced, first by the fall of their patron, Hussein, and then by de-Baathification. They were angered anew by the status and powers claimed by Kurdish and Shiite parties in Iraq’s government, which the Americans in Baghdad had granted in an interim constitution. Seething under foreign occupation and shifting domestic politics, much of Duluiyah tolerated, if not outright supported, the insurgents’ campaign. When Americans left their base, they were often attacked by gunfire, rocket-propelled grenades, and bombs on the roads. First Squadron, Fourth Cavalry Regiment lost several soldiers and a private contractor that year.

  The demands of maintaining troops in an isolated base led to gunfights timed to the resupply schedule. To keep MacKenzie provisioned, the American military sent roughly two convoys a week from its logistics base in Balad through Duluiyah to Mackenzie. Each contained ten to fifteen trucks carrying food, fuel, ammunition, spare parts, mail, and anything else the base’s residents required. Often their enemies were waiting. To discourage ambushes before they occurred, when a convoy was due, the soldiers would send out Bradleys to clear the way. It was a risky routine, a forcible opening of the only ground route to the base’s southern gate. The violence was such an established part of the routine that on one section of road more than three kilometers long the Americans plowed and burned all the vegetation on each side, creating standoff in a deadly corridor. The fighting could still be pitched, especially in the built-up areas through which the road passed. Earlier in the summer of 2005, one of the attackers moved close enough to throw an RKG-3 armor-piercing hand grenade onto the top of a Bradley. The grenade—a shaped charge attached to a small parachute that directs the weapon’s penetrating blast—cut a hole through the armor, nearly killing a soldier inside. A week before Slebodnik arrived, a convoy of resupply trucks from KBR had been cut off and swarmed by attackers in the city, leading to a long battle between militants and an American patrol that drove to help them; several unarmed contractors were wounded or killed. Children had been involved in the attack, and some of the drivers were shot at close range as mobs rushed their trucks, adding to Duluiyah’s rising tally of American lives. After the battle, survivors said Iraqi police officers had participated in the ambu
sh. By then, the route had earned a standard name: Ambush Alley. One section, where the armed groups hid most of their makeshift bombs, carried a more menacing distinction: Death Valley. Bringing supplies to MacKenzie was a war within the war.

  Recognizing that the roads to Duluiyah required more American eyes and MacKenzie needed more firepower, the Army was using Kiowas to keep the place alive. Soldiers running the Ambush Alley gauntlet tried to have two helicopters in the air around them every time a convoy was due. The relationship was symbiotic. The convoys carried the Kiowas’ fuel.

  * * *

  Slebodnik found his way to his bunk inside a shipping container along the airfield, and took a tour of his latest home. Soldiers had been busy. They had cleaned the hangars, chasing away rats and snakes, and built a nonalcoholic bar, improved the gym, and hooked up Internet and phone connections. Life on the base was safer than it had been in 2004. Kiowa pilots had been flying around the clock for most of the year. The flatlands that surrounded MacKenzie offered no place for attackers to conceal themselves, and the frequent comings and goings of the helicopters forced mortar and rocket teams to reconsider tactics. Nights tended to be quiet.The soldiers lived under a roof of black sky and bright stars.

  Alpha Troop’s first phase of the deployment was for familiarization and breaking in. The fresh pilots worked with their peers from the departing troop to learn the terrain and pick up the rhythm of the air cavalry’s war. Each aviator adjusted to the repetitious loop of missions: where to meet for preflight briefings, where to test-fire weapons, where to refuel and rearm while on missions away, what to do when not in the air. Slebodnik was put on reverse cycle, sleeping in the container by day and flying at night. One day, to adjust, he took Ambien to sleep. The schedule was draining and the amenities were less than what was available on larger bases, but he was satisfied. There were phones with which he could call Tanja, talk to their children, and get updates on their infant son. There were computer terminals with Internet and access to email. He knew Tanja worried. He understood how silence could be agonizing. He followed a habit of notification, a ritual of assurance that their future was safe. Whenever he returned from a flight, no matter how distracted or tired, he would send an email containing two words she waited to read: “Down safe.”