Ryan Smithson

by Ghosts of War: The True Story of a 19-Year-Old GI

  Basic training taught me to appreciate freedom. My deployment, I hope, is allowing me to spread that freedom.

  We get to Camp Virginia and unload our duffel bags. There are soldiers stationed here to in-process units like us. They take our IDs, for financial purposes, swipe them in a card reader, and give them back. They give us a briefing, but it’s hard to listen. Traveling through eight time zones makes you real tired.

  We split into company formations and get another briefing from our commander. He leads us to our group of tents. They’re tan on the outside and white on the inside. They have wooden floors to prevent camel spiders and scorpions from crawling in our boots at night. It’s December and the bugs aren’t too bad. I notice it’s chillier than I thought Kuwait would be. Low 40s at nighttime.

  So far no car bombs, no scorpions, and no sweltering heat. With every new experience I learn how false my pretenses about the Middle East have been.

  We stay in Kuwait for three weeks, getting used to the eight-hour difference in time zones and the foreign climate: the dry weather, the wind, the sand.

  We are waiting for our engineering equipment (construction vehicles) to arrive on navy ships coming up the Persian Gulf.

  PMCS (Preventative Maintenance Checks and Services) is an inventory and inspection of anything we use in the army—from our weapons to our gas masks to our engineering equipment. It’s checking every nut and every bolt, every seal and every fluid level. And it’s how engineers spend most of their time.

  When there’s nothing to do, we PMCS. After we’re done, if there’s still nothing to do, we PMCS. Before we use a piece of equipment, we PMCS. After we finish using a piece of equipment, we PMCS. It’s such a common task that we joke about it. When we’re caught sleeping, we tell our squad leader that we’re PMCSing our eyelids. Renninger rarely finds it funny.

  Another big part of our three weeks in Kuwait is to train on equipment. Every soldier in the platoon is cross-trained on the equipment we may have to operate during our tour. On an average day, between chow and cigarette breaks, first and second squad—the operators—cross-train the other squads on how to PMCS and use our loaders, dozers, hydraulic excavators, backhoes, Bobcats, and 5-ton dumps.

  Then third squad—the concrete squad—cross-trains the other squads on how to PMCS and use their concrete mixing trucks, called PLSs. These are not the tumbling, cone-shaped tanks on wheels you see at construction sites. Picture some militant, OD green Willy Wonka machine that stores, mixes, and pours clay, limestone, and water. All of this is a very complicated process, too complicated for third squad to explain fully. So they give us a basic rundown of how a PLS works. Then a hands-on training driving the monster.

  Fourth squad—the dump truck drivers—cross-trains the other squads on how to PMCS and operate the M916 tractors, the trailers that go with them, the 20-ton dump trucks, and the LMTVs (Light Medium Tactical Vehicles)—large cargo trucks each with a gun turret.

  For almost every serious army training, we take steps—called the crawl, walk, and run stages. The crawling stage involves the PMCS and basic operation (i.e., how to turn it on). The walking stage involves driving around a cone, maybe on a civilian road, or in a Kuwaiti army camp, the military routes on camp. In the States running means you know what you’re doing without really thinking. In Kuwait running means ready to do it in combat. Like anybody could ever be ready for combat.

  After three weeks the commander announces that he wants the unit to be at its final destination by Christmas. None of us knows our final destination yet. All he can tell us is “It’s in Iraq.” Gee, thanks.

  But we do know that Christmas is a blackout day. On a blackout day, other than routine patrols, convoys don’t operate in Iraq. These Islamic assholes are on a holy mission, and they’d love to grease one of us on an international Christian holiday.

  We spend our last week in Kuwait awake for hours and hours getting ready for the company-wide convoy. Half the company flew up to Iraq as the “advanced party,” but there’s still one hundred or more soldiers living out of duffel bags, sleeping on fold-out cots in tents, and organizing every piece of equipment headquarters company owns. PMCSing it, training on it, and trying to find a home for it in the massive convoy.

  I’ll be driving a 20-ton dump truck across the border into Iraq. I only know the 20-ton dump truck as far as crawl stage. I haven’t operated it at all. I’m licensed on it, but I really haven’t a clue how to drive it. And it’s a stick shift.

  Since we have so many soldiers to transport, standing in the back of my dump body will be four guys. One of them, Josh Miller, is in EQ’s first squad with me. He’ll be manning an M60 machine gun for which we’ll have to weld a makeshift gun mount onto the dump. We’ll be crossing the border of a combat zone. We’ll be facing death.

  LT organizes time for me to train on the 20-ton—a total of two times. My vehicle isn’t the only one in need of armor and gun mounts, and when I’m done training with it, I park by the maintenance platoon.

  The unit has stumbled upon quarter-inch thick plates of armor. It’s weak, but it’s better than nothing. And apparently it’s made in the Middle East, because everyone calls it haji armor.

  Maintenance platoon runs the extensive operation. They have the welding tools and oxyacetylene torches and bolts and power drills and grinders and air compressors and a hundred other things I never thought I’d be using at midnight in the Middle East. I get sleep in two-hour intervals every twelve to sixteen hours, and the entire company is working together to weld haji armor on as many trucks as possible.

  Running on minimal sleep does things to a person. At first it’s simply exhausting. I feel like I can no longer stand up or keep my eyes open. The pain in my leg muscles is deep and throbbing.

  And my brain feels like it’s on the verge of stopping completely. I have double vision. I wonder why our tent now smells like Grandma’s basement, why my duffel bag smells like my father’s aftershave.

  As soldiers, we push ourselves. We push one another. We’re all in it together. If one quits, we all quit. So we keep one another from giving in to the sleep.

  It’s one o’clock in the morning, and the M916 tractor trailer to which I’m fastening armor is lit by a giant working lamp, just like the ones parked at construction sites back home and parked at Ground Zero, and it’s powered by a generator that is low on gas; I’ll have to fill it up soon. (I’m fastening a bolt and a nut.) The 916’s bumper number is H-1307, and it still needs a box of MREs and a little oil for the trip. Miller said he’ll take care of that tomorrow, and he’s a hard worker—grew up on a dairy farm in Ohio—so he’ll do it. The truck’s okay on water, but its left brake light is cracked a little. I wrote that up three days ago after morning chow: runny scrambled eggs like snot but awesome French toast. (The bolt turns; the nut tightens.) 1307’s missing an oil dipstick, which Sergeant Dodds, fourth squad’s leader, said was okay as long as you cover the oil check with duct tape. He knows a lot about trucks because he’s a truck driver back home. He once shot a hooker in the face with a fire extinguisher. See, the way fire extinguishers work is they suck the oxygen from the air, and since fire needs oxygen to burn, by sucking the oxygen you put out the fire, but a fire extinguisher in your face (the bolt tightens) sucks away the oxygen and makes you feel like drowning. And while this truck-stop hooker gasps for air, Arthur Dodds slams his driver side door shut and drives away, because he’s married, has been for fifteen years, has two kids, the youngest of whom he nicknamed “Pickleman.” I notice a long shiny hair in the dust cloud off to my left, and (righty tighty, lefty loosy) I quickly place that hair on the head of the only female in EQ platoon: SPC Alyssa Doudna. A pebble flies out from under her boot as she walks away from the group of welders, grinders, and me. The pebble’s from the smoking area, and I wish such an attractive young woman wouldn’t smoke. (The thin armor gets closer to the door.) I spot the oil stain on SPC Josh Roman’s left desert combat boot. I laughed hysterically yesterday when he
spilled hydraulic oil on himself while he was filling one of the scoop loaders, and now he’s sitting on the wheel well of the front tire as he bolts armor to the door. (His bolt tightens.) And he’s laughing at a story being told by SGT Buckelew, who stands behind me and who’s being funny and witty because his expanded, sleep-deprived mind operates on a level that we’re all addicted to like chocolate-covered crack, and he’s telling us about this time in Sunday school when one of the nuns farted. She kept teaching like nothing had happened, and Wilfred Buckelew III, he held in his laugh forever before he burst out hysterically, and he was beaten across his hand with a ruler. Roman and I laugh hysterically because Buck’s face and impression of himself trying to hold in a laugh is the funniest expression we’ve ever seen, and there’s a maniacal quality in my laugh that I am very proud of. (The bolt tightens fully and the armor is on the door.)

  Our shift is over. We’d love some sleep, and none of us is very hungry. But we decide to walk a half mile to the chow hall anyway. The thing that’s great about army camps overseas is they have four meals a day. Because so many soldiers are working through all hours of the night, there’s a midnight chow. We fill the generator with gas first, and the three of us walk and talk and laugh and bond on a level I never thought possible with people I’ve known less than two months. We eat through our hour-long break and then continue working.

  And this is the life of a soldier in Kuwait. Soldiers doing what they have to do to enter Iraq, a country they don’t really want to visit in the first place. Simple GIs doing their part in their generation’s war. Our involvement probably won’t mean anything when the war’s all said and done. The war will probably come to the same conclusion no matter what we do. So we do what we’re told. There’s no point in fighting it. Just do the best we can. Me and this ragtag group of GIs called Equipment Platoon.

  The army tells me to go to Fort Bragg so I do it. The army tells me to pack my shit and hop a plane to the throat of the Persian Gulf so I do it. The army tells me, an average teenage boy just doing what he can after witnessing the worst attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor, to armor my own 20-ton and then drive four boys and a platoon sergeant into a combat zone so I do it.

  COLD LIGHTNING

  I’m not really ready for it. I’m a GI following orders. Somehow I think we’ll be pulled back, our mission scratched. “Sorry about the confusion, folks. Return home to your families.” But, really, no such luck.

  It goes on as planned. Our convoy leaves for Iraq on December 22, 2004. And ready or not, here it comes.

  Driving in the middle of a thirty-vehicle convoy, I feel my nerves relax. This is how training is supposed to work. You do it so much, it feels natural. True, this is my third time driving a 20-ton dump truck, but my MOS is operating equipment. I’m used to the rough, wide handling of military junk, and my experience relaxes me. Of course we’re not yet in Iraq.

  After a full six hours of convoying, we stop at another camp in Kuwait: Camp Cedar Two. There isn’t enough room or necessity for us to be set up with tents like at Camp Virginia, so we stage the vehicles in a large formation and use them for a barracks.

  Attached to my rucksack is the army-issue sleeping bag that smells like old vinyl and cooked pine. When we stop, the vehicles are staged in two long lines. I’m somewhere in the middle, and I dismount the tall dump truck to begin my after-operations PMCS.

  As I come around the right side of the 20-ton, I see SGT Tim Folden doing an after-PMCS on his M916. He’s rubbing his backside with his empty hand.

  “How’s your ass?” I ask.

  “I’ll let you know once I can feel it again,” he says. We both laugh.

  We continue our PMCS and then head off to dinner. In the chow hall I find one of the long tables with EQ members sitting at it. At this table the meal is quiet. Soldiers stationed at this camp surround us, and we look at them with a bit of jealousy and a bit of pride.

  We’re crossing the border tomorrow. Most of these soldiers won’t go into Iraq for their whole deployment. They eat their meals, laughing and joking. We look at them the way a pack of wolves must look at domesticated dogs.

  Like we’ll be fighting to survive tomorrow while these guys will be sitting in these same seats. Like we’ll be lucky to eat tomorrow while these guys just wait for a dinner call, for a pile of food in their bowls.

  That night the temperature drops 30 or 40 degrees. The chill is so fast it seems to drop down my spine. This sudden chill, it’s like the Grim Reaper tracing your spine with his fingernail.

  I lie in the back of the dump truck trying to fall asleep, and the cold desert night even reaches me in my sleeping bag. These sleeping bags work for, like, forty below. I tell myself it’s the metal of the dump truck bed. Metal’s a conductor, and it sucks the cold right out of the air. I tell myself it’s keeping me from falling asleep.

  I climb out of the back of the 20-ton and gaze up at the mere sliver of crescent moon. I think of the old adage of God’s thumbnail. In this part of the world, during this time of the year, God’s thumbnail points straight down. And since the Middle East is the supposed birthplace of civilization (and Jesus and Mohammed), well, I guess that makes sense.

  I take my bundled-up sleeping bag to Folden’s tractor trailer. The 916 trailers have two-by-eights running down the center. These pieces of wood, unlike the metal dump bed, are insulators. They’re resistant to temperature change. There are already more than a dozen soldiers claiming Folden’s trailer as their bed, man-sized cocoons huddling to the center of a flatbed.

  I find an empty spot and bunk down. As I fall asleep, I watch the stars. The sky here is so clear that I see five shooting stars before I doze off. That’s five wishes. And they all involve tomorrow.

  As we awake, we brush the frost off our sleeping bags. We pack our stuff, brush our teeth, and pee behind the vehicles’ wheels. We PMCS, I open an MRE and take out the instant coffee.

  MREs are the vacuum-packed meals the army gives soldiers in the field. At room temperature MREs have a shelf life of over ten years. And each little pouch of food can withstand a static load of two hundred pounds for three minutes. This means that a two-hundred-pound man could stand on top of a bag of applesauce without it bursting. The downside of this strength and stamina is everything in them tastes like salty cardboard.

  I pour the powdered coffee into a Baggie and add cold water from my canteen. I use as little water as possible. That way I’m not forced to sip the coffee. Instead I take it like a shot of caffeine.

  One of the maintenance guys pulls out a stick of chalk. It’s good chalk that doesn’t wash off easy. The maintenance platoon uses it to write on equipment, to mark it for whatever kind of maintenance reason. We use it for decoration.

  One guy draws a target on his 20-ton with the exclamation “You won’t do it!” Someone else writes “Iraq or Bust” on his Humvee. The 20-ton ahead of me says “C-Ya in Hell” on its rear bumper. The Lord’s prayer is written on an armored 916 door. Someone else writes “Acme” on a gun turret. Another draws flames.

  The rumble of thirty or so diesel engines starting wakes up the sun. It comes up as we roll out the gate of the camp. It’s December 23. I joined the army exactly two years ago.

  We’re in Iraq. Iraq is on TV—the evening news. Being in Iraq is like being on a new planet. It’s something other people do, like curing world hunger. It’s something that’s not supposed to happen in real life. Not to me. It’s getting AIDS. It’s being broken down. It’s the first day of Red Phase.

  A small number of the company already flew into Iraq to coordinate things for our arrival. I get to drive into Iraq. I am jealous of the advanced party. They got the easy way out: a stress-free C130 aircraft. I get a 20-ton dump truck. But all of us who have to convoy, maybe we’re the lucky ones. We claim injustice, we ask why we can’t all fly, but really we don’t care. We didn’t come to Iraq to fly over Iraq. We came here to fucking own the place.

  In Kuwait we don’t travel with locke
d and loaded magazines. When we near the border, Munoz picks up his M16, loads a magazine, and slams the bolt forward. He does the same for mine. That sound of a weapon being loaded, metal crunching together, it sounds lethal. That click-clack, it sounds like power.

  We cross the border, and we’re ready for buildings exploding, for car bombs and mushroom clouds. We’re ready for bloodstains and dead bodies. I can feel my heartbeat in my throat, and I’m ready to fight my way through towns and villages. Kuwait isn’t where they riot in the streets and burn the American flag. Kuwait is not where they plant roadside bombs and shoot at us. That’s Iraq.

  We cross the border, and we’re ready to kill. We’re ready to die.

  We cross the border, and there are children. Little girls and little boys. Their faces are dirty with desert sand and sweat. But it’s not what they look like that shocks me. It’s what they do.

  They see our convoy. We Americans, we’re occupying their country. CNN says it’s wrong, and on some level, I know it’s wrong. MSNBC says the people of Iraq hate us, and on some level I know they hate us. And I know that Josh Miller—an average, redheaded farm boy—will be forced to shoot these children when they start throwing rocks at us. That’s the SOP (Standard Operating Procedure).

  It was covered in the convoy briefing. The “hooahs” that we yelled were forced and pathetic. “Hooah” is the army phrase that lets everyone know you’re all in. Think “Tonight, men, we take that hill!” and then a crowd of scruffy guys yells, “Hooah!” from their guts. By definition hooah means anything but no. But in the briefing before we left when LT reminded us of our SOP, gave us orders to shoot children if they threw rocks, the hooahs sounded desperate, like boys acting tough.

  Rocks are life-threatening when you’re traveling sixty miles an hour.

  Suck it up. You’re a soldier and this is war.