In the midst of all the smoke, noise, and confusion, Knowlden saw Colonel Infanti collapse in the street next to his truck, seemingly unconscious or mortally wounded. His adrenaline had finally worn off. Knowlden got on the radio, yelling for the medic who always accompanied a commander’s patrol. The call was unnecessary. Courville was already racing through the smoke toward Infanti.
Even though Captain Knowlden had herself been injured in the IED explosion, she scrambled out to help the big medic. Just in time, it seemed, for a second IED detonated underneath her truck, ripping off the back hatch and sending it flying end over end through the air. Fortunately for the other passengers, they had abandoned the truck to return fire against attacking insurgents.
Still under fire, Courville hoisted his unconscious commander off the pavement and stuffed him into the back seat of his damaged vehicle where, at least partially protected by side armor, he began to treat him for head injuries.
As usual, the contact didn’t last long. The ambushers hauled ass, leaving in their wake four damaged or disabled humvees, two wounded Americans, and a number of injured civilian bystanders caught in the crossfire. Colonel Infanti suffered from a serious concussion and other cuts and bruises, but, characteristically, insisted on staying with the brigade until it was recalled to Fort Drum.
During his battlefield treatment of the wounded officer, Courville used scissors to cut off Infanti’s clothing to check for additional injuries. Infanti had put on a new uniform that morning. From then on, every time the Colonel got ready to circulate, he lifted an eyebrow at the medic in mock rebuke.
“Corporal,” he joked, “this is a brand-new uniform I’m wearing.”
“Yes, sir. I’ve got a brand-new pair of scissors.”
SIXTEEN
Each patrol base had its obligatory coffee brewer operating on a generator in the common area. Sergeant Ronnie Montgomery started stripping off his battle rattle as soon as he entered the big house at Inchon; Delta’s four platoons rotated periodically among the three outposts. Somebody had propped Brenda the Bitch on a chair at the card table. She was a blow-up, anatomically correct, life-sized doll one of the Joes had ordered from Hustler magazine as a joke on Joe Anzak. Montgomery poured himself a cup of coffee, tasted it, and made a face. Guys were always receiving exotic coffees in care packages from home. A half-dozen or so different brands sat at the table among spilled creamer and empty sugar packets.
“Is it too much to ask that we stick to just one kind of coffee?” he grumbled. “An average cup of coffee shouldn’t be too much to ask for.”
He seized Brenda by the tit and tossed her at a worn-out sofa salvaged from only God knew where. He collapsed in her chair at the table and was scowling at his coffee cup when the rest of Second Platoon straggled in from maintenance on their hummers. Second had been out most of the night on a wild goose chase over in Kharghouli, nothing but dry holes.
Joe Anzak grabbed Nathaniel Given in a quick headlock as soon as Given came through the door. Second was currently sharing Inchon with First Platoon and Delta’s HQ element.
“What’s up, faggot?” Anzak said. “Anything exciting happen last night?”
Given slipped free and rained fake punches into Anzak’s midsection. “Naw, man. Same ole same ole. You know, rescuing damsels in distress and saving the world from the manticore. I got to get some sleep. If you guys are going out, wake me for chow when you get back, okay?”
“You have it. See you in a few hours.”
“No feaky-feaky with the ladies.”
On his way through, Specialist Dar-rell Whitney (spelled Darrell, but pronounced Dar-rell) rescued Brenda from the floor where Sergeant Montgomery had tossed her. He copped a feel.
“Ain’t feaky-feaky the reason we got Brenda?” he said.
Joe Merchant grabbed him in a headlock. “What’s with you black boys, always fucking with the white girls?”
“That’s African-American men to you, honky,” Whitney shot back, slipping free.
“Whatever. Get your hands off Brenda. It’s my turn to sleep with her.”
“She is such a whore.”
Soldiers in an all-male environment could be remarkably disgusting. Day-to-day life at the forts was an eclectic mixture of Animal House, Doctor Phil, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Life might be more or less expendable outside the walls, but inside existed at least a modicum of security where guys could let down a little.
The patrol bases were never really quiet, not with soldiers working 24-hour shifts and always coming and going—on-going shifts walking doggedly out to their vehicles to replace soldiers who staggered in to their bunks looking drained from the bone-deep weariness of day-after-day tension, but nonetheless gamely trying to keep up each other’s spirits. The forts had about them the feel of old bus stations coupled with the odd stench of occupation most would always associate with the war—the putrid odors of burning garbage and human excrement, of diesel fuel, open MRE packets, sweat, and musty clothing.
The bunkrooms were mostly kept near pitch dark because of shift work. They resembled cluttered and fusty caves strewn with resting bodies as from some apocalyptic disaster scene. Sandbags, sheet metal, and planks of wood barricaded the windows against the enemy as well as against sunlight. Only a few diligent rays found their way through cracks to the sleeping soldiers within.
Off-time, what little there was of it when men weren’t sleeping or eating, was consumed with taped music, reading, cards, Nintendo and computer games, laptop music, and the grabassing and clowning around of young men away from home, some for the first time. Men got tight with others they might not have even spoken to under different circumstances, forming a closeness and loyalty that time and distance would never break.
Guys like Anzak and Jimenez had the capacity to raise the mood of entire squads and platoons. They were always joking around, never seeming to let things get them down, seldom a bad word to say to or about anyone. A bunch of guys back from patrol would start comparing stories about whatever action may have occurred, debating about who shot what and how close they had come to getting wasted. Before the mood had a chance to get dark and the guys started brooding, Jimenez might flash one of his million-dollar grins, throw himself onto the old torn-up sofa, and plunge into a joke that only he could tell to its fullest benefit.
“These two Arab fuckers boarded a flight and sat down in the window seats with a 10th Mountain soldier in the aisle seat. The Polar Bear kicked off his shoes and was settling down when one of the Arabs says, ‘I need to get up and get a Coke.’
“ ‘Don’t get up. I’m in the aisle seat. I’ll get it for you.’
“As soon as the soldier got up, one of the Arabs spat a goober in his shoe.
“This happened twice more. The soldier knew immediately what had happened when the plane landed and he put on his shoes. He leaned over to his Arab seatmates.
“ ‘Why does it have to be this way?’ he asked. ‘How long must this go on? This fighting between our nations? This hatred? This animosity? This spitting in shoes and pissing in Cokes . . . ?’ ”
Joe Anzak remembered being away from home as a kid and some of the other kids bawling at night, wanting to go home. He hated that pussy shit, but he wanted to go home now and he could imagine how badly homesickness affected some of the other guys. It became his personal mission to take their minds off it, to keep them going. He could be a real character, making a big show of heading off to the latrine with a wag bag and a feaky-feaky magazine.
“I’m going to be busy for a while. Don’t bother me.”
Sometime, for the amusement and edification of the platoon, he would lean back on his bunk clad only in his underwear and light his farts with a cigarette lighter, shooting out blue flame. “Incoming!”
“Man, you’re gonna burn your nuts off.”
“Come on over here, sweets. I can hold you if you like. Lie down next to me and spoon.”
In order to compensate for the isolation, to bring i
n a little order and civilization, everyone went all out in celebrating holidays, birthdays, and anniversaries. On Halloween, some of the guys camouflage-painted their faces and went trick-or-treating in their underwear and combat boots, dashing from bunk to bunk soliciting leftover MRE chocolate bars or care package candy. Birthdays and anniversaries required exchanging little gifts—a clean pair of socks, cherished MRE oatmeal cookies, somebody’s last pack of American cigarettes . . .
No matter how hard they tried to forget the war, however, it had its ways of intruding. Chiva Lares’ truck hit an IED on his twenty-first birthday. Robert Pool got mortared on his twentieth.
Specialist Pool, who wanted to be a psychiatrist one day, was tall and slender with light-brown hair and a wife waiting back in California. He had come up hard on the streets, more or less abandoned by his parents to make his own way. He got into pushing dope and was likely on his way to prison sooner or later when he met his wife and enlisted in the army. He liked to say he went from big man on the streets to big target in Iraq. In California, he was accustomed to punks holding grudges, but it took some real getting used to when people started trying to blow him up.
Victor Chavez sang Happy Birthday, Dear Shitbird to him while a couple of other guys burped in accompaniment. Then Third Platoon had to pull a mounted/dismounted patrol to search for roadside IEDs. Pool’s squad, led by Chavez, did the dismount and was trudging through the weeds and underbrush about fifty meters off and parallel to the road when Pool heard the unmistakable bloodcurdling whistle of an incoming mortar round, then a loud Thump as the shell impacted on Malibu near the slow-moving trucks. The dismounted half of the platoon hit the dirt; the mounted half hunkered down inside their armor.
Four more rounds followed in quick succession, thudding up and down the road, geysering up black smoke, asphalt, and dirt, and filling the air with the terrifying whine of shrapnel. Good thing the Jihadists couldn’t shoot for shit. During the lull that followed, Sergeant Chavez ordered his squad to break for the armored safety of the hummers.
Pool was huffing up the road bank toward the nearest truck when a shell streamed down like a Roman candle and hit the road directly in front of him. It was a dud. Instead of detonating and killing or wounding the entire foot squad, it bounced twice like a stone skipping on water and slammed into a house on the other side of the road where it finally exploded, blowing a hole in the poor farmer’s house.
A couple of turret gunners spotted seven or eight Baghdads with AK-47s hot-footing it across the road about three hundred meters away. They were probably supposed to be the attack cleanup element but had chickened out when they saw the mortars had caused no damage. Third’s gunners lit them up with .50-cals and two-forties. They vanished into the countryside. As usual, the QRF found little except a few blood trails and some poor bastard hiding in a house with blood on his trousers. He was taken to Brigade for questioning and detention.
The adrenalin was still pumping when Third Platoon returned to 152. Fourth Platoon on base security detail wanted to hear all about it.
“That was something else, man!”
“Sounds like it. Anybody hurt?”
“No problem. You ought to see the vehicles though. Ricochet dents all over them. It was fucking crazy.”
“For a change, just one time, I’d like to see a good firefight initiated by us instead of by them.”
“Happy birthday, Bobbie,” James Cook said.
Pool hoped it wasn’t his last.
Conditions at the patrol bases were decidedly primitive, especially at the outset. Men ate nothing but MREs supplemented by whatever they received in care packages and, infrequently, by kabobs they purchased from vendors or, as with Second and Fourth Platoons that time, chickens from the local markets. On security watch, an infantryman did everything he could to stay awake and alert. He drank coffee, dipped tobacco, figured out ways to smoke cigarettes without letting any light escape.
Sleep following a shift was more important than anything else—more than money, happiness, or sex. Yet, it seemed sleep in the hot houses did everything it could to evade a man. He would wake up rolling in sweat, get up and drink Gatorade, then go back to his sweat-soaked sleeping bag to wrestle with sleep some more. Some of the guys tried sleeping on the roofs in the open air like most of the Iraqis did. Only, flies started swarming an hour or two before daybreak, taking over from the night-shift mosquitoes, making it impossible to sleep.
Under Colonel Infanti’s guidance, conditions in the AO gradually improved. As he informed his battalion staff, “We want our guys to be able to fight outside the wire, but when they come inside they have got to feel secure taking off their gear. They need reasonable chow, cool water, a comfortable place to sleep, toilet facilities, some down time . . . Make it happen.”
A “meals on wheels” from Battalion eventually began delivering chow to the outposts at least once a day, providing the truck didn’t run over an IED and have to be towed back. One afternoon, Staff Sergeant “Cookie” Urbina and his kitchen in a trailer showed up at Inchon to whip up the best meal any of the Joes had had in weeks. He had come to stay.
Cookie was around forty, a small man with a stout Hispanic accent. His talent for creating gastronomic miracles with Raman noodles and powdered eggs, spicing them up with condiments for a little variety, immediately made him the most popular soldier in Delta Company. On chilly autumn nights he always had a hot pot of soup burbling on the stove for whenever the men came back from the field. Sometimes he sent soup cups out with them.
“I’d marry you today if you weren’t so damned ugly, Cookie,” Anzak teased.
“Puck you, Joe.”
For Thanksgiving, Cookie prepared a turkey dinner with all the trimmings, consumed by the men in stages as they came and went on their duties. The war never stopped. Everyone looked forward to Christmas when Cookie promised to pull out all the stops. Lieutenants Dudish and Tomasello offered to take their platoons on another shopping spree. A Christmas goose sounded nice.
Water for the troops was a life-or-death proposition in a climate where temperatures often reached triple digits, even in the winter. Bottled water supplied their needs at first. Coolers powered by small generators kept it almost cold. After a while, the outposts received large rubber donut-shaped storage tanks that supplied running water for the patrol bases. Eventually, there were even warm showers supplied by two hundred-gallon drums assembled on the flat roofs of the houses where the water could be heated by the sun.
Gasoline-powered generators provided energy for lights and computers—and eventually for air conditioning to cool off the bunkrooms and make life in the desert almost bearable. This luxury, however, did not arrive until the beginning of summer in 2007.
In World War II or Korea, as in most wars, the advance of an infantry outfit could be traced by the path of litter it left in its wake—cast off C-ration cans, food wrappers, empty ammo crates, greasy fire pits, half-filled-in latrine trenches . . . In Iraq, one of the first tasks of the new U.S. “green-conscious” army was to construct sanitary burn and waste disposal pits to eliminate litter. The tongue-in-cheek motto of the Green Army became a standing joke: “Leave the war cleaner than you found it.”
“Wag bags” served as the dogface Joe’s first toilet. Wag bags were simply heavy-duty trash bags into which a soldier did his duty. Then he tied a knot in the top of it and delivered it to a pit to be burned. Any violation of the practice was bound to cause a stir.
“Sir, I just seen a guy taking a shit out in the open.”
“Wonderful. That’s the kind of report Battalion needs. Did you offer him a Handi Wipe?”
Medics were in charge of sanitation and preventive medicine. The first shitters they built at the patrol bases were too high, so that legs dangled whenever soldiers sat to take their constitutionals. Later, pre-built wooden toilets were trucked in. They had metal buckets underneath the holes, like the ones used in the 1991 Operation Desert Storm, but wag bags still had to be utilized.
This was accomplished by the soldier spreading his bag across the mouth of the metal receptacle, then afterwards escorting the filled bag to the burn pit as usual. No more Vietnam-era mixing diesel with wastes and burning out the cans.
Iraqi Army terps and soldiers stationed at the patrol bases with Americans turned out to be a major hitch in solving the sanitation challenge. Most lower-class Arabs wiped their asses with their bare hands and were accustomed to sleeping next to where they shat and shitting next to where they ate. The back yard enclosed by the blast wall at Inchon, where most of the IA were stationed, turned into a minefield from the terps taking their dumps right on the ground. Even after “porta-potties” were installed, the IAs still preferred the open ground or, worse yet, the plywood ledge next to the holes in the latrine.
The location of the mines was quite frequently pinpointed by the sound of angry cursing when a patrol prepared to exit the compound at night and some groggy GI stepped in a mess.
“I am going to profoundly shoot the next motherfucker I see drop his drawers—”
Life was lived according to the next patrol—and that produced an entirely new angle of routine in the lonely forts on Malibu Road. Between missions, some of the men went off to themselves in the dark and chainsmoked cigarettes, puffing away while their hands shook. Yearning to go home. Hell, yearning to go anywhere away from here.
“When this war is over,” Sammy Rhodes said, “basically I am going to pack up my stuff and walk all the way down Malibu Road back to the real world.”
“You’re kidding, right, Sam? This war ain’t ever gonna end.”
“I don’t think we should answer the radio anymore,” Corny Courneya proposed. “ ‘We’re sorry. Delta ain’t in at the moment. Please leave a message at the sound of the tone and we’ll get back to the war when it’s more convenient.’ ”
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