by Nico Walker
There was a point where Carentan crossed the river and you’d have to cross on a pontoon bridge since the actual bridge had been bombed during the invasion. Bravo Company kept a bridge guard there, and lots of haji kids hung around in the daytime to beg MREs off the soldiers on the banks of the river. The kids were skinny shoeless boys mostly. There was also a little girl you’d see sometimes who might have been seven or eight, or she might have been older only more malnourished. She had dusty brown hair that was like a bird’s nest, and her dress was like something out of the Flintstones.
We called her Pebbles.
We kept two rifle squads at the Iraqi Police station in the city center. But it was whatever. We didn’t control the city. Neither did the IPs. It was the Mahdi militia who controlled the city. We had a cease-fire with the Mahdi on account of the higher-ups having decided they were too much of a pain in the ass to fight. The Mahdi were Shia. And they were backed by Iran. So we weren’t allowed to fuck with the Mahdi and we weren’t allowed to patrol the city. We could drive to the police station and leave the same way we had come in. That was all.
The police station was three stories high with a walled courtyard in front and another in back. There was a jail and it was packed with prisoners. One time the prisoners all sang together and you could hear them outside the jail and it was very beautiful and it made you feel like an asshole.
Some of the IPs were alright. Some of them were fucks. But that was whatever too. And there was a special haji SWAT team sort of deal there and the hajis on the haji SWAT team thought they were the hottest shit going; they were absolutely fucking delusional but this was what they thought. They rode around in a shitty compact pickup with a machine gun in the back and them all piled on top of one another looking like a lot of goddamn fools. We hated the shit out of them because they’d got some kicks out of showing us grainy IED videos on a portable DVD player; they’d pointed at the screen and said, “You see? Good. You see? You see? Good, yes?”
Yes, we were for killing them and it would have been easy. But orders were orders, and we’d been told to endure them for the sake of their hearts and minds. So we did.
* * *
—
I WAS on the roof of the police station, on a guard shift, trying to figure out the sniper scope on an M14. This wasn’t my job but I had got stuck up on the roof with this M14 and I was doing my best. We didn’t ever have near as many guys as we were supposed to have.
An IP walked up behind me and said, “Mister.”
He offered me a cigarette, a Miami. He called me brother. It was a windy day. You had to be careful smoking Miamis on a windy day; one false move and the Miami would turn to ash in a great flash of light. I cupped the cigarette. The haji cop admired my form. He smiled knowingly, and said he wanted to ask me something. I said alright.
He gave me a long windup about this crippled wife of his: “The leg is very sick, you see.”
He asked if I had any morphine I could spare.
“You want me to give you morphine?”
“Aha! You did not know. But you see, I too know things about medicine.”
“I’m sorry but I have no morphine I can give you.”
“You have the morphine, yes?”
“If I give you morphine I’ll get in trouble.”
“You can give the morphine to me?”
“No.”
He stopped smiling and he said something in Arabic. Sounded like “motherfucker.”
Going home, the Humvees stopped to wait to cross the pontoon bridge. Sergeant North saw the shoeless haji kids and Pebbles standing out there and he got an idea. He opened his door and called to Pebbles. He held out an MRE and waved to her. She hurried towards him, reaching out for the MRE, and North, who incidentally survived the tour without a scratch, pulled the MRE out of her reach just when she got there and he shut the up-armored door and thought it was funny.
* * *
—
ON DAYS when it wasn’t our turn to go to the police station we’d get sent out to the middle of fucking nowhere to collect unexploded ordnance. A couple of us would have mine detectors. Sometimes we’d walk in old minefields. It was boring as hell.
We were out this way around an old barracks complex. It had been bombed in one of the wars, and all the buildings were in ruins. I wandered around. I got to thinking of Emily and I tried to picture what she was doing. I pictured her eating her lunch, probably something with lentils. Then I remembered it wasn’t lunchtime where she was.
There was an old Air Force bomb lying out on the desert floor. It hadn’t exploded whenever it was dropped. It was cracked open and there was green foam that had come out of it. Our people took turns posing with the bomb, having their pictures taken.
The lieutenant called it in.
The radio came back and said to get away from the bomb.
So they all got away from the bomb.
That same day three vans full of explosives went off and killed more than 140 outside the mosque near the police station. First Platoon was there when it happened. Some of them stood on the roof of the police station and filmed what they could get of it with their digital cameras. I saw the videos they took and you couldn’t really see anything.
* * *
—
OUR FIRST raid was on an apartment complex north of the Big Shia City. We came up in a wedge formation over a long stretch of open ground looking up at a lot of windows. It had been raining. I thought, This isn’t a bad way of drawing fire.
All I had was a 9mm pistol and everyone else had a proper gun and I felt like a fool. I asked the sergeant nearest me, “Am I supposed to have my weapon drawn? Cuz I don’t know. It seems kind of stupid.”
Staff Sergeant Greene had been an NYPD cop. He had enlisted after September 11. They said he’d killed 15 hajis in 2003. He was no faker.
He said, “Shut up.”
So I drew my pistol and I did my best, but I had my mind made up to look into getting a better gun when I got back to the FOB.
A lot of bomb-making material was found in the apartment of an IP captain, and he was detained. We also found a few dozen mortar rounds and 155mm shells all around the grounds behind the buildings. One-five-fives were the big ones. You hit an IED with a couple one-five-fives in it and you were having a bad day, probably your last bad day. So we gathered up all of those and brought them back with us and rode back to the FOB with them rolling around on the floors of the tracks, wondering if we’d suddenly disappear.
* * *
—
WE WENT back to the Big Shia City for the Ashura. One hundred thousand pilgrims would be there. At least 100,000. We expected attacks. We were staying at the police station through the week, a whole platoon’s worth of us.
I was doing a turn on radio guard. It was the middle of the night. Valentine’s Day was coming up and there was a laptop with Internet in the radio room, so I got an idea about ordering Emily some flowers. I had my debit card on me. I asked Staff Sergeant Castro and he said I could use the computer. Castro was laid-back. I went online and found an affordable orchid for $110. It had to be an orchid; nothing else would do.
I couldn’t come up with anything good to put on the card. I was tired, I guess. I ended up typing the bouquet of parentheses from Seymour: An Introduction. I thought she’d know what it was. I signed “love” and my initials.
Staff Sergeant Castro asked me if I was a rich kid.
I said not especially but we never starved or nothin.
In the morning I was in the back courtyard, guarding things as I often was, and it was getting on in the morning because the shit flies were out. The shit flies landed on your lips and walked around. Then they went to go get more shit on their feet. There was shit everywhere so it was easy enough and they’d come back and they’d walk around on your lips some more. It got so you only notic
ed when they weren’t around.
I heard some shit like yelling, and two IPs crashed through a door into the courtyard. They were wrestling over a 9mm Glock. Both of the IPs were wearing plain clothes. They looked like 1970s TV detectives with their slacks and their mustaches and their leather jackets. I knew the gun was loaded; people don’t usually wrestle over unloaded guns. And it was a Glock so there was no safety switch on it. I didn’t know if I was supposed to shoot them.
So I just stood there. Some more haji cops ran out and they pulled the two apart and one of them got run off and somebody threw a shoe.
* * *
—
THE PILGRIMS came out under a white sky. The imam had been martyred where the big mosque was and that had been 1000 years ago and the mosque was named for him. That’s what the intelligence officer had said.
The minaret broadcast verses and a great slow drum sounded and the men struck themselves with knives in unison. I was standing on top of the barricade and I saw all this. A sea of black. Dust clouds rising into the air and disappearing. Nothing changed in 1000 years.
And now when I try to remember the way the verses went, the way the drum went, I can’t get all the way back there. I am forever outside of it. I know how it was, how it looked, but I can’t see it. I didn’t have a camera. I didn’t believe in taking a camera out with me. I suppose I thought if the Haj ever took me alive I wouldn’t want him filming me with my own camera when I got my head sawed off.
Some IPs came back and showed me their cuts from where they had been cutting their own heads. The cuts were unimpressive. It was like they almost really had and then hadn’t.
On the last night of the Ashura a haji tried to sneak over the wall behind the police station, and Sergeant Bautista shot him in the ass with a star-cluster flare. I was there too. The haji got away. We could have shot him a lot more and with real bullets and nobody would have given us a hard time about it. But we were fakers, so we didn’t.
At the bridge on the way back, I gave Pebbles an MRE. She held it tight against her chest and ran off with it. But one of the shoeless boys caught her and punched her in the head and took the MRE away from her. She was sitting in the dust when we drove away.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
We didn’t get much in the way of prior notice; then the sergeants were at us, going:
“Git yer shit.”
“Chop chop, dalli dalli.”
So on and so forth.
PFC Borges was huffing computer duster with his battle buddy, Specialist Roche, when Staff Sergeant Castro came banging on the door. Borges went to get it but he was too fucked up and he fell and busted his lip. He had to go to the aid station to get stitches real fast.
It was an inauspicious start to Operation Honor Bright. Yet we rode out, north by northwest.
Our work was tiring and we wouldn’t have much luck because Haji knew we were coming, because when you were mech you didn’t ever surprise anyone.
It was a lot of women and children, some old men. You didn’t see men of fighting age when you were out there. Either they were with the IAs or they were with the IPs or they were dead or they were detained or they were hiding or they were somewhere else.
A rifle squad walked the road that ran along the riverbank. Shooting broke out in a clutch of houses on the other side of the river. Grenades going off, machine-gun fire—it sounded like something real. The squad took cover on the back side of the road. Except Borges and I. We slid down the shooting side and scanned the far bank of the river. This was my first day carrying a rifle. I’d traded my pistol to Yuri for it. Now I was looking to see if there was anybody I could shoot bullets into.
Not a minute, not 30 seconds. The shooting stopped. And maybe it was real, but it was nothing to do with us. Staff Sergeant North and Staff Sergeant Castro were laughing on the far side of the road. They’d done this kind of thing before. North, who had just got his E-6, had been with the battalion in ’03, and he had shot a haji off a rooftop. Castro, a former Marine, had been at Fallujah in ’04. He said, “C’mon, doc. Don’t be fucked up. You’re supposed to go away from the shooting.”
I said something. I was still a retard.
“Okay,” he said. “Whatever you say. Next time, the other direction.”
Even Borges was laughing at me and he’d done the exact same shit I’d done. Really I’d just been following his lead. And he had about wiped out sliding down the berm. But nobody would bust his balls over it; Borges was on his second tour, so if he wanted to fuck up and get himself shot, that was on him.
We went back the way we came, and we stopped at an empty house facing the river. Halfway across the river was an island that was overgrown with date palms. North cocked a high-explosive round in his two-oh-three and sent it into the island, where it worked about as you’d expect. That was just North acting out. He was disappointed because we were on the wrong side of the river and he knew he wasn’t going to get to kill anybody.
* * *
—
LIEUTENANT HEYWARD had been fired. It was because he kept having us all put in bullshit paperwork. He’d made up a bunch of sworn statements for all of us who had been on QRF1 that Christmas. The sworn statements said we had all been within 50 meters of the battalion TOC when the rocket hit it. This wasn’t true. We had been much farther away than that. But had we been within 50 meters we would get credit for having been in combat and Heyward would get a Combat Infantryman Badge, which was good for promotion points if for nothing else. So 50 meters it was. And he had us all sign these statements he had written up on our behalf and he turned them in. When they got kicked back he printed out a new batch and had us sign again. Then he turned the new batch in and got himself fired that way.
* * *
—
EVEN WHEN the people were shooting, my mind was somewhere else. I was out of sorts. I’d asked Emily if she’d got the orchid I’d sent her and she’d said yeah, she’d got it. Well what did she think? She thought it was dumb. Why had she thought it was dumb? What did the card mean? It was the bouquet of parentheses from Seymour: An Introduction. Well, what the fuck was that? She didn’t know. I’d given her that book around the time we met. I’d thought she’d like the story with the quiet old man who smoked and drank liquor. She’d said she liked the book. Had she even read the book?
I’d told some of this to Yuri. I said, “She’s fucking hiding something, isn’t she?”
He said I was a fucking idiot.
Did that mean he thought she was hiding something?
I said, “Yuri, just tell me yes or no. Is she hiding something?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
It was 22:00 and Delta Company had just hit their umpteenth IED in eight hours. The battalion had been taking casualties. We were sent on a raid. The ramp dropped and we weren’t far from some houses. Our company first sergeant, First Sergeant Hightower, had come along. He was a stout man, built like a coconut; he seemed excited. The door on the first house was made of sheet metal like all the doors were. But this one had bullet holes all over it, and the light inside the house glared through the holes. We lifted our NVGs and we were hesitating; then Staff Sergeant Hueso-Santiago came running up like the movies and kicked the door in and we went in after him. Inside were the ubiquitous women and children, the ubiquitous old man. They were all along the wall. The television was on. We searched the room. The wooden chest on the table in the corner was packed full of clothes, and there was an AK-47 wrapped up in a shirt with two loaded magazines. This wasn’t a big deal because they were allowed to have these things. But the first sergeant either didn’t know or had momentarily forgotten because he took the AK-47 away and he was talking to it when he went outside, saying, “Yes, I’ve got you. I’ve got you, yes.”
This was the first sergeant’s first rodeo.
There was ground to cover before the next house, but we didn�
��t make a big deal out of it and we got there. We stacked up and rushed through the front door and came into a room that had another four doors off it. Everything was in night vision. Nobody was talking. We were making it up as we went. We each took a door. I was in front of a door and I’d never kicked a door in before and I was worried I’d kick it ineffectually. The sheet metal gave way easy enough, and the bolt came out of the slot. It was a small room. There were no hajis, only some goats: a mama goat and her baby goats.
Some shit was happening behind me and I turned around and saw a naked haji was caught up wrestling with Private Miller. Miller had been in Echo Company all of three days. He was just out of basic. Now this shit. He brought a heel down on the inside of the haji’s knee and he dragged it down the length of the tibia. Even before Hueso-Santiago could jump in, it was over. The naked haji was down on the floor. He was young, fighting age. There was a young woman too. She was backed up against the far wall of the bedroom. She had wrapped herself in a sheet. An AK-47 leaned against the wall in the corner across from the door.
Miller said, “He was going for the AK, Sarr.”
He said it like he thought he was in trouble.
Hueso-Santiago said, “You did right.”
Somebody brought an old man and his old wife out from one of the rooms. The old man and his wife saw what had happened, and the old man got to yelling and the old lady started to shake. The first sergeant wanted to question the old man. But the old man wasn’t having it. He said something to the interpreter; sounded like What the fuck is this? And the first sergeant pointed at me and told the old man I was a doctor.
Somebody asked if the leg was broken.