The explosion had almost completely leveled the church. It was breathtaking. During the initial bombing of Iraq, many buildings in what was to be designated the Green Zone and in other parts of Baghdad had suffered direct hits. These buildings still stood, some a little tattered, but they stood. Apparently, they had reinforced-concrete walls that had helped them withstand the blasts from above. Almost nothing was standing here.
As I approached the church, each step I took crinkled with broken glass. There was twisted metal everywhere, and I saw occasional splotches of something that looked like chewed bubble gum. A huge piece clung to my boot, and I tried in vain to scrape it off by dragging my foot. I finally reached down and grabbed it. Between my ungloved fingers, it felt like boiled chicken skin clinging to my fingers and sticking to everything it touched. Slowly, I realized that this was not chicken skin—it was part of a human body. The fractured and shredded remains of dozens of human bodies lay among the rubble. I started to vomit. At least when I had dealt with death before, the bodies had remained more or less intact. To annihilate the human body into pools of gelatinous goo seemed to cross some personal boundary. I shook off the nausea and began to move quickly onward. I tried to step on larger pieces of glass, as if each crunch of glass meant I had avoided stepping on human pieces.
I picked my way toward the parking lot and took in the damage. The blast had cleared a remarkably broad path. Cars lay overturned and smoldering. Walls had disintegrated into piles of bricks, and the entire facade of the church simply no longer existed. Soldiers were showing up from all over the sector, summoned here for a search-and-rescue effort. Within minutes, it was clear to most of us that there would be no rescue. The gaping hole in the asphalt marked the exact point where the car bomb detonated, right at the front door of the church. A search party went out to look for the engine, apparently because measuring how far an engine flew was the most reliable test for the strength of an explosion. As they ventured off and other soldiers began to spread out into a perimeter, I noticed a group of Western civilians picking their way through the rubble. The Misfits must have joined in the search and brought the camera crew along with them, I thought. What a great night for them to join us—just when everything was going to hell.
The lurking violence that had deposited more and more Iraqis in the morgue and filled the coalition hospital with wounded soldiers had given way to a night of car bombings. The holy month was turning out to be the most restive so far, but there was not much left for me to do here except say a prayer and move back to the FOB. It was in moments like these when a tactical retreat represented the only sane solution. We would go back, regroup, and start over tomorrow. Things were clearly still changing here, and they were not changing for the better.
The next morning we had to make a trip to the Green Zone. Despite the radical deviation of the last few days, it was past the first week of the month. I needed to pick up the money for the interpreters. Those who had remained with us deserved to get their money on time. Plus, I would be able to stop in and check on Ammar. The Misfits looked worn out because they had been down for only a few hours after last night’s airport run and the church bombing, but they were in good spirits. The Green Zone, for all of its faults, was a secure area, and they could spend some time relaxing while I settled the accounts.
One of the other captains, also from Texas, came along to attend to some separate business in the Green Zone. The rest of the battalion recovered and prepared for whatever might happen next. Reports of car bombs had come in from everywhere last night. We did not drive to the Green Zone down the normal route, winding through the streets and checking on people as we went. Instead, we took only the highways. The surface streets were getting more dangerous by the day. Despite the increase of IED attacks on the highways, I decided that speed and the time of day would provide us with sufficient defense and were preferable to navigating the neighborhoods right now. Mid-mornings were usually pretty busy with traffic. Most IED attacks came during less busy times, so the insurgents could better target military vehicles. The few times I had seen IEDs detonate during busier times, the blast inevitably hit an Iraqi car. This collateral damage not only cost the insurgents sympathy from the people—a fact I am not sure they cared about—but it also cost them an IED. I know that they cared about that. More important, on the highways we could swerve. In the narrow confines of the surface streets, there was often barely enough room for us to squeeze past a parked car. Now that I knew a parked car could be a bomb capable of leveling a building, I decided the highways were a safer place to travel. I hated that the insurgents had successfully manipulated our movements in that way. I wanted to disregard the car bomb as a new threat on a changing battlefield, but the greasy stains on my boots turned my stomach every time I looked down. I did not want any of us to be turned into an atomized memory on somebody’s boots. Not if we could avoid it.
We conducted our ritual entry of the Green Zone, exchanging passwords and clearing weapons. We wove through sandbagged corridors and past Iraqis waiting to be searched. There were definitely more armored vehicles around this time, because the car bomb threat had made its way to this point as well. Then, just like that, we passed into the serenity and tranquility that characterized the Green Zone. People were jogging without body armor, and girls in tank tops stretched out on the grass while taking a break from their desk jobs at the U.S. Embassy. It was so far removed from the life we lived that I could barely process what I was seeing as normal. Every month we came here, and every month it was the same experience. A trip to the Green Zone was like visiting another planet. We stopped the trucks in the shade of a huge tree adjacent to a palace wall, and the soldiers immediately took off their gear. Children ran up to us selling bootleg American DVDs for a dollar. They had some willing buyers in soldiers who wanted to make FOB life more interesting.
Meanwhile, back in our sector, an informant alerted one of our patrols that a second church was about to be bombed. My commander, sensing an opportunity to engage the insurgents, ordered all of the patrols in the area, including several helicopters, to the church. The road from the FOB to the targeted church was a straight line running through the heart of Abu Discher past the Yazeen Mosque and the huge field that we had cleared of burning trash. On the left, blocks of apartment buildings that housed displaced Palestinians loomed over the developing battlefield. Although this area was less than a mile from the FOB and had never been particularly violent for us, the informant seemed credible, so the decision had been made. Our unit would confront the insurgents here and attempt to stop this bombing.
Within moments of arriving in the area, the helicopters sighted men hiding behind the walls that ran parallel to the road leading from the FOB to the second church. The men were waiting for the convoy of American Humvees to approach. They streamed like ants from the parking lot adjacent to the Yazeen Mosque, carrying weapons into their fighting positions. They were so engrossed in setting up the ambush that they probably did not hear the helicopters until the rockets whistled in to their hiding spots. Freely firing their machine guns and their rockets, the helicopters alerted the patrols and continued a withering attack on the would-be assailants. The devastating attack surprised and destroyed the ambushers, definitely saving the lives of a few soldiers who rumbled down the road just out of range of the ambush zone.
Because we were in the Green Zone, out of communications range from Al Dora, this entire attack happened without our knowledge. I had signed for the several thousand dollars that I would distribute to our interpreters this evening. The soldiers had conducted their business and eaten lunch. All in all, it had been a pleasant break from the action. We drove back out the way we had come, past the joggers and the palaces, beyond the sandbagged entrances and the armored vehicles. We cleared the last turn, and the bolts of all of the weapons jammed forward. We were back on our turf now, and around here we carried loaded weapons.
We took the direct route back again, using the highway, looping around th
e traffic circle made famous by the statue of Saddam Hussein that had been pulled down by U.S. Marines to the delight of jubilant Iraqi crowds the previous year. We crossed the Saddam Bridge, a double-decker behemoth, with traffic flowing north across the top of the bridge and south through a lower level. Given that I was becoming increasingly worried about car bombs, it did not seem to be a good idea to go through the lower level. There were just too many ways to get trapped down there. For some reason, the top seemed better. At least up there we could maneuver more easily if we had to reverse course. So we turned up the wrong direction of the access ramp and began shooting into the air. Cars swerved left and right as our convoy of Humvees fired warning shots. We hurled insults and bore into traffic from the wrong direction. This was another complication of the Baghdad commute; you had to worry about American patrols usurping the road.
We sailed back into Al Dora and our familiar environs. We coasted past the community center and toward the unguarded overpass. Reaching it, we came back into communications range. I heard rapid radio traffic about an attack and another one about an IED along the highway. The sea of brake lights ahead of us indicated that the lines of vehicles had come to a dead stop. We could not afford to be stuck in traffic because we would be a sitting target. I glanced over and noticed that we were close to a spot we often used to cut across the highway, a break in the cement barriers. Cutting through these breaks had become a bit more dangerous because the Iraqis realized they were good places to put IEDs, but we did not have much choice. I had to decide quickly whether to stay here and get bottled in or shoot through the gap and hope for the best.
“Take the cut-through,” I said, indicating that we would take the surface streets back to the FOB, essentially heading straight for the other patrols that were reporting the completion of the firefight and cataloguing the results of the helicopter attack. In a flash, the Humvees turned and raced for the gap, barreling across the oncoming lane and deflecting a few cars with the crunching noise of a sedan smashing into an armored door. Cars smashed into each other in our wake, but we did not have time to stop. The reports of dead bodies were steadily coming in now, and clearly we were missing an important piece of the puzzle.
We would enter the sector near the second church, the one that had been threatened with the bomb earlier, and drive west to the FOB, essentially taking the exact reverse course that the ambush had been designed around an hour earlier. We would therefore be behind the enemy, although I didn’t know it at the time. From a few hundred meters away, nothing seemed strange or out of the ordinary until we turned onto the road leading back to the FOB. As we headed onto a divided, two-lane street, we saw a group of several hundred people standing around a smoking bus. This was not normal, and I immediately realized that this was one of the puzzle pieces that made sense of the radio reports. There had been an accident of some kind, I thought. This area had been so peaceful, I could not even hypothesize that there had been an attack or any violence here.
I stopped the convoy and got out. The crowd was livid. I saw several bodies in the bus and a few more on the ground. I still had no idea what had happened, but something did not feel right. Dead bodies had become routine, but the crowd was more menacing than normal. The tension and the palpable rage were so uncomfortable that I decided to go back to the FOB and learn what was going on. I did not want to be in this crowd for another second. As we accelerated away from the mob, I breathed a sigh of relief.
A half-mile down the road, soldiers were spread out in a defensive perimeter. We pulled over when I saw my commander’s Humvee. He was standing over a dying Iraqi and pointing at a pile of equipment. There were radios, bulletproof vests, vials of morphine, and plenty of ammunition. He was evidently no ordinary street fighter. I looked around. There was a burning car farther down the road, several more bodies, and the soldiers from our unit going in and out of houses. There had been an ambush.
“The crowd down the road is pissed,” I said, stating the obvious. “There are also several more dead bodies down there.”
“Go get them,” my commander said flatly.
“Go get them?” I asked incredulously. I could not believe he wanted me to go back into that hornet’s nest and attempt to remove dead bodies. Under normal circumstances that would incite violence. Given the last twenty-four hours, it would be a bloodbath.
“Are you scared?” he asked, not really as a challenge, but more as a sincere question. The answer was yes.
“What do you think?” I asked my most senior noncommissioned officer.
“We can do it, sir.” His answer gave me reassurance. I looked at the Misfits. They were fearless, and in such moments we depended on one another for reinforcement and support.
I asked a few more questions about the specifics, but ultimately my commander decided the bodies were not important. We would look for anything like radios, weapons, and medicine, in and around the bus, to help us determine the identity of the attackers. That seemed like a reasonable request, so I gathered up the Misfits and told them the plan. The other Texas captain elected to stay with us, because he also sensed that something was not right around the bus. And another weapon might be useful.
We loaded back up and started to roll toward the bus. We felt extremely uncomfortable to know that we had just driven through an attack zone, and now we were going back into it. I could not shake the ominous feeling that was so thick in the air. Then I saw them—two indicators in one glance—and I knew we were in trouble.
We had entered a wide-open area, where massive power lines lay draped over enormous towers to bring electricity from the power plant. The area contained only one small, squat building, and a man was running toward it—a long-limbed figure dressed in black from head to toe and wearing a black mask. Gangly and awkward-looking, he was almost as thin as the rocket-propelled grenade launcher he was carrying. I could not believe I was actually seeing him in the light of day. It was only early afternoon, yet here he was running across an open field—the same faceless insurgent who was plastered on every piece of propaganda. Until now, we had encountered insurgents only at night and had only seen them up close dead, so they had become almost mythical. Yet here was our “Sasquatch.”
“KILL HIM, BABBITT!” I yelled.
The insurgent was running for a weeded marsh behind the house. Specialist Travis Babbitt brought the machine gun to life on the roof of the truck. I saw the tracer rounds rake at the hooded insurgent as he entered the reeds. He was still standing when I last saw him. I called for the three trucks to pull up, side by side, and orient themselves toward a far row of houses. We needed to assess the situation. I partly dismounted while I called the engagement back to my commander. We had seen only one guy, we had engaged him, but…I did not finish. The air erupted into bullets and explosions. Not like anytime before—this was a more determined effort. The bullets were not simply whizzing past us; they were digging into the trucks and the road. They were precise, and they were coming from everywhere. We returned fire at blurred figures moving in the distance. Rounds from both us and the insurgents hummed into the walls of the adjacent neighborhood buildings.
I tried to figure out our next move and spun around instinctively, only to see six more masked men fewer than twenty yards away and closing fast, firing their AK-47s from the hip.
“BEHIND US!” I yelled and fired into the torsos of the attackers.
Bodies contorted in anguish. The survivors aborted their attack and stumbled back behind a wall. I reloaded quickly and looked up. Something was missing. From the din of the battle—the exploding grenades, the shrieking shrapnel, the whistling bullets—something was missing. The machine gun in my truck had stopped firing.
“Babbitt’s hit!” the other captain yelled as he pulled his six-foot-six frame over the armored sideboards into the bed of the Humvee to assist Babbitt.
Bullets continued to whir past, and I spotted another group of insurgents behind us, but the captain’s words trudged into my mind slowly, as if t
hey were being dragged through cement. I raised my rifle, firing into several more black figures, feeling each recoil and watching each round eject as I tried to catch a glimpse of Babbitt over the back of the truck. This open-backed Humvee was one of the few remaining of its type. It was still one of the retrofitted models from the early days and was due to be replaced in the near future. Babbitt had been particularly exposed up there, but he had always liked having the visibility and the responsibility. Now he was lying beneath the gun he had so carefully cared for. The other captain was starting CPR. He had been a paramedic. He could save Babbitt, I told myself. But deep down I knew he was going fast—way too fast.
We had to get Babbitt out of here, but, unlike during previous engagements, this enemy was not retreating. They advanced from all sides and had pushed the rest of us into a defensive posture, crouched behind the open doors of the Humvees.
I keyed the radio. “WE NEED SOME HELP HERE!” I crouched behind the door, wincing as a rocket-propelled grenade exploded just behind us, deafening me. “WE NEED IT NOW!”
Radio protocol was out. Calm under pressure was out. We were a few minutes away from a catastrophic ending. Fortunately, as I looked up, my commander and his three trucks were barreling down on us. The synergy between our two groups was remarkably high, and we often fought together. They did not even slow down as they passed us. Their armored Humvees were groaning under the strain of racing engines, while their machine guns ripped into the cluster of insurgents just beyond the field.
I signaled to the next two trucks that I had to evacuate Babbitt. They would link up with my commander and continue to fight. In the next few minutes, although they seemed like an eternity, the surge of American vehicles changed the momentum of the battle. Three additional Humvees, followed by five or six more and dozens of U.S. soldiers, poured into the fight, but I did not see any of it. We had to get Babbitt to the FOB, a five-minute drive back through the ambush zone, by ourselves. One truck. Any IED, RPG, or even small-arms attack would be devastating to us. This was the type of chance that every insurgent wanted, a lone American Humvee with no machine gunner making a run for it. I hated to give the enemy this chance, but we had no choice. We traveled with only three soldiers per vehicle, and we simply did not have another man to divert to the empty machine gun while I coordinated the medical evacuation. We turned and headed toward the FOB. I prayed for a smooth, fast ride.
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