The car seems to hesitate for a moment, then continues ahead. It’ll be past your bumper in a few seconds. You’re probably within blast radius right now, and the thought that you should just duck pops into your head. You push it away. The ROE is all about your personal subjective threat assessment, an assessment that, given al-Qaeda’s well-known tactic of impersonating civilians, is very hard to make. The ROE card makes clear however, that NOTHING ON THIS CARD PREVENTS YOU FROM USING ALL FORCE NECESSARY TO DEFEND YOURSELF, which is either a smart reminder of priorities or an end-run around the rules themselves. Your NCOs have made it clear to you that you are absolutely permitted and expected to light up a hajji that’s intent on plowing into the convoy and won’t respond to shouts, warning shots, and so on. The step now is to walk fire up into the engine block and then into the driver. You’ve just about committed to blow the BMW away when you remember the two-liter water bottle next to you and wonder if you can just fling it onto their windshield, like maybe the driver is too dense to realize that you’re going to shoot him unless he stops, or is spooked and needs to be snapped out of it. You’re out of time.
DO YOU:
Try and fling the water bottle onto the BMW’s windshield? TURN TO (4)
Engage the BWM with the .50 caliber? TURN TO (5).
(4) WATER
You grab the water bottle in one of your green, fuzzy gloves and chuck it. Your aim is true. The bottle caroms off the windshield right in front of the driver. This would get a reaction out of you for sure. But instead of stopping, the BMW driver steps on it and speeds past you in the next lane while you’re trying to get the Fifty around. There’s no longer a question of warning shots, but you could still stop the vehicle before it reaches the tankers. If you blow it away, you run the risk of Swiss-cheesing a family. If you don’t stop it and it’s a VBIED and it gets to one of the JP-4 Tankers, it could wipe out half the convoy.
DO YOU:
Fire on the BMW? TURN TO (5).
Let the BMW pass into the convoy? TURN TO (6).
(5) FIRE
The M2 Browning .50 caliber machine gun was designed near the end of the First World War, and its design reflects its heritage. It is black and 100 percent steel and more than five feet long, weighing well over one hundred pounds loaded. Each round is almost half a foot long, and they are clipped together in long steel belts that disintegrate into shell casing and projectile with a sound that is described as “barking” but of course doesn’t sound like anything else except for the repeated detonations of about 250 grains of propellant reverberating through a four-foot-long steel barrel. There is a widespread misconception among American combat soldiers that its use against human targets is banned by a number of treaties, and recruits have been told by generations of drill sergeants to aim a Fifty at enemy soldiers’ “equipment” rather than their bodies. The persistence of this myth can probably be explained by the fact that while smaller bullets punch holes in humans, the Fifty takes them apart.
You draw a bead at the piece of concrete just in front of the BMW and depress the butterfly trigger. It is terrifically loud. You struggle to keep the muzzle from moving up and right as it spits out five huge slugs per second—the BMW is right next to the trucks and heaven forfend you put a round into one of your buddies or a tanker. Your grandmother used to say “heaven forfend,” and the phrase is repeated in your panic brain in a queer voice that is somewhere between your grandmother’s and your own. You quit firing after three bursts, unwilling to continue to shoot alongside (heaven forfend) your own column. You watch gratefully as another gunner a few trucks down opens up as well.
The riddled BMW swerves to the left and slows. Your ribcage expands, as it seems like a physical weight has been lifted. You have not killed your friends, either with a bullet or through inaction. No one will suffer polytrauma because of you, you think, and to know that after a few seconds of not knowing it gives you a euphoria almost palpably chemical, the dopamine hitting your brain and a wave of pleasure moving from your scalp to your balls.
The column is moving slowly forward and your truck follows. The BMW slows and lists to port. It has no remaining windows. There is no blood visible, though of course there must be a sea of blood. A Browning .50 caliber round puts a hole in a human body the size of a grapefruit. The hole is much larger than the slug itself because of the kinetic force of the slug hitting flesh at approximately 2,910 feet per second.
It is afternoon and the sun is at about a forty-five-degree angle from the ground and very bright. Through the lattice of complex shadows you can see what is probably a human body in the back seat. One of the silhouette’s hands is up by its shoulder, as though it is calling a waiter. You can see into the car more easily because all of the bullets make the shadow cast by the car’s roof and sides somewhat translucent. You are convinced for a second that the person sitting up in the backseat is alive and unharmed. There are now a few thin streams of blood running from a bullet hole low in the passenger door and onto the concrete. The smell of burned-up ammunition propellant is acrid and strong. You briefly remember that the BMW could still be a bomb and duck back into your hatch after making a quick 360-degree scan. You then pass the location of the IED explosion and are out on the open road again, picking up speed, the radio buzzing furiously.
TURN TO (7)
(6) DENOUEMENT (I)
You have about two seconds to make this decision. Your heart tightens up, and your thumbs clench a bit, but you do not press the trigger. Maybe you decided at the time that the statistical probability of any black BMW sprinting into a US convoy in al-Anbar being an actual suicide bomber was low enough that the risk of death should be borne by your comrades rather than the BMW’s occupants. More probably you just froze up in the moment and couldn’t bring yourself to fire on a human being—a normal enough problem for troops throughout history. You’re a smart person, and you’ll have years to rationalize the decision.
The BMW floors it up through the convoy until it gets to the fourth truck, where Boyce sees it and is faster on the trigger than you. He yells at the BMW and puts a few rounds into the concrete in front of it. The BMW keeps going. As per SOP, Boyce then puts down a steady stream of fire in front of the vehicle, and the car drives right through it like a pole of fresh timber though a mill saw. The car swings to the left and smashes up against the median. The convoy’s radios are all going furiously. Drivers don’t know whether to drive in the right lane closest to the IED and the dirt berm that was drawing the convoy’s fire, or in the left lane closest to the now-smoking BMW that everyone assumes is a possible VBIED.
You have gone back to scanning the rear, but allow yourself a long glance at the BMW as it passes by your right shoulder. Aside from the scattered dents in the roof, it looks from the rear like the driver just parked it up against the median for some inscrutable reason. You think you see at least one other person in the vehicle besides the driver. Soon the convoy clears the IED, and the spread-out broken glass and parked-looking, corpse-filled vehicle recede into the distance as you pick up speed.
You’ll be chewed out but good for letting some random car come right into the convoy like that. You’ll get a lot of meaningful glances from the other members of your platoon, too, who also spend time thinking about getting their jaws or dicks blown off, and who depend on you to fend off bombers. The next morning, your squad leader informs you that he’s swapping you out with the driver. You’ll be behind the wheel for the rest of the rotation.
THE END
(7) DENOUEMENT (II)
They do not ask how you knew that BMW was a VBIED; the whole crux of the terrorist tactic is to take what looks like an innocent civilian family sedan or produce truck and rig it to blow. The idea is to use your own humanity against you—if you are fast on the trigger, you will end up stopping car bombers but killing civilians, doing al-Qaeda’s work for it. If you hold your fire past the point of no return, you will start to get hit more often as al-Qaeda realizes that convoys are soft targets.
It is the other asymmetry of this type of asymmetric warfare: heads they win, tails you lose.
It was a good shoot—the vehicle was speeding into the convoy. The LT arranges for you to see the chaplain anyway, because he suspects (with what you imagine is near certainty) that the BMW was full of civilians, the driver maybe having been spooked by the IED and thinking the thing to do was just step on it. Possibly he was drunk, unusual at midafternoon, but who knows? You shot them, regardless. You accept this, at first, as an unfortunate happenstance that is sort of the by-product of a landscape in which every enemy appears by design to be a civilian, which means that every civilian appears as a possible enemy. It will become a small hard nut of guilt and self-pity that you carry around, and that will, in subtle ways, color your opinions about yourself and the government and the people around you. You will find it hard to concentrate and your mind will frequently wander. You will stew in anger over insults that you imagine in daydreams. You will want to kill again, for a time. You will never quite be the same, although of course, no one can be certain whether or not this is a bad thing.
THE END
*Most people have only seen large explosions in movies and so understandably assume that a large bomb makes a sort of loud but sort of wet and rumbly sound, because this is the sound it makes in theaters. But theater explosions are made by the vibrations of speaker cones, whereas an actual explosion is the sound of air expanding at like twenty thousand feet per second, which for obvious legal as well as technical reasons even the fanciest Dolby-surround-sound systems cannot reproduce. If you’ve never heard a large explosion go off nearby, just think of one of those little Black Cat firecrackers that tween boys like to light and throw on the street around the Fourth of July, then multiply it by a thousand or ten thousand until it’s a loud, sharp, and pretty scary sound that you can feel as well as hear, and (because you can feel it) always seems surprisingly close.
12
BIG TWO-HEARTED HUNTING CREEK
Brian Van Reet
A FEW WEEKS AGO, SLEED AND I loaded onto a sleek tour bus. We filed behind a gaggle of other “wounded warriors”—the term the Army used to refer to us in official memoranda. I guess it’s what we were, but the phrase was too cute to do our ugliness justice.
It was a beautiful May day, and we were taking the bus to Maryland to do some trout fishing. I had convinced Sleed to come along after seeing a sign-up sheet in the hallway outside my group’s meeting room. I normally wouldn’t participate in extracurriculars, but had fished the stream we’d be going to, years before. I grew up nearby in the city of Frederick and guess I took the trip because I wanted to revisit old stomping grounds—that, and I was going stir crazy in the barracks.
There were a bunch of guys like me at Walter Reed—severe burn cases, the faceless. You would think we would have hung out together, but we avoided it as much as possible. We all looked the same; being around one another was like looking in a mirror. None of us wanted that. We wanted to forget.
Sleed was not faceless. His was okay—a few scars—but mostly intact. Back at Camp War Eagle, he had been standing beside me in the awards ceremony, both of us receiving commendation medals from the Division Commander, when the suicide bomber ran up and exploded himself. Sleed lost his cock and balls and one of his legs above the knee. My privates survived the blast—my right leg shielded them—but I was never going to need them again, not with how I looked. I don’t know how it was Sleed took most of the shrapnel while I got the brunt of the fireball. There’s no explaining these things.
Sleed was served divorce papers shortly after returning to the States from the army hospital in Germany. His wife came bearing them on her one trip to DC from Toad Lick, Georgia, to visit her wounded husband. Turned out she had been cheating on him for most of the time he had been overseas and cited the loss of his reproductive organs, among other reasons, as grounds for divorce. She wanted more kids.
The whole situation was nightmarishly helpless, but there it was, our bodies transformed in a flash I could not remember. The only thing to do now was deal with it. Time was reckoned in two halves, before and after. I took a window seat on the bus. Sleed sat beside me. He was tall and ropey muscled, with freckled skin that tanned deeply in summer and paled to magnolia white in winter.
The air brakes released with a hiss, and we pulled out of the parking lot and onto Georgia Avenue. I thought it must be a painful reminder for Sleed to have to live on a street named after his home state, where his wife was probably hard at work trying to have more babies with her new boyfriend, a divorced first sergeant with two kids of his own. Sleed had sworn to fight his wife—“The Bitch,” as he unfailingly called her—for custody of their three-year-old daughter, but the judge in the case had ruled the proceedings delayed until Sleed’s medical retirement could be processed. In the meantime, Sleed had employed a private detective to gather dirt on his wife.
He had been raised in a foster home, surrounded by people he called his brothers and sisters, some black, some white. The way he talked about it, it had been rough, and he still hadn’t rid himself of the bad habit that had resurfaced way back in the first week of our deployment: the liberal use of the n-word. The drill sergeants had broken him of this unfortunate tic in basic, but it had reared its ugly head again in Iraq and never gone away.
Sometimes, if we were in a public place, I would have to elbow him to silence his incessant rants about “that nigga that stole that fucking bitch and my kid.” The thing was, his wife’s new boyfriend wasn’t black. Sleed wasn’t a racist. He used the slur at random, sometimes affectionately, sometimes reproachfully, but never in reference to skin tone. Trouble was other people didn’t know that.
He was one of those larger-than-life personalities, able to pull you out of your troubles and into his. Christmas morning, 2004, the bombed-out UN compound in Baghdad. In the muddy field on the other side of the wall, an Iraqi boy called up to my tower: “Mistah, Mistah, Merry Christmas! Chocalaté?”
Eight hours of soft and steady rain falling from a grey sky, soaking our body armor and black fleece, sucking the heat from our core. Along with myself, Sleed and the other members of 3rd Platoon pulled guard in the towers and bunkers encircling the UN. We were cold and wet on Christmas; engaged in the pointless activity of guarding an abandoned complex of buildings. Morale was especially low.
We carried walkabout radios, and Sleed came over the net thirty minutes into the miserable shift. He proceeded to tell jokes about our mothers for the better part of an hour, one after the other, a ceaseless string of insult: “Hey, Tower Seven, yo’ momma so fat, she have to put on lipstick with a paint roller”; “Front Gate, yo’ momma so stupid, when yo’ daddy said it was chilly outside, she ran out with a spoon”; “. . . so poor, she hangs the toilet paper up to dry”; “. . . so greasy, she sweats Crisco”; “. . . head so small, she got her ear pierced and died”; “. . . so nasty, she have to creep up on bathwater.” And once he had insulted all our mothers and exhausted his extensive repertoire, someone else came over the net and took up the banner. Trifling, moronic, and juvenile, yes, but in this way 3rd Platoon passed Christmas 2004.
Never at a loss for words, he was now unusually quiet as we traveled due north for a few miles before merging onto the Beltway. We passed out of DC proper and into Maryland, taking I-270. The scenery changed from urban to suburban. Million-dollar McMansions, quarter-million-dollar condos, strip malls, golf courses, and commercial parks lined the highway. Traffic lightened up—the cars all headed the other way, into Washington. Compared to Baghdad, everything looked so green. The vividness of it was like being on a mild dose of psychedelics, all the time.
Readjusting my sensibilities was a slow process, and I was also just getting used to not having my weapon with me. Call it “phantom gun syndrome.” Like an amputee who still feels his limb tickle, I would find myself reaching down my right side, searching for the M4 carbine that should have been slung on my shoulder. I missed its reassuring heft, the wa
y the charging handle dug into my hipbone.
We traveled for an hour. When we hit the clustered spires of Frederick, my old hometown, we switched onto US-15. Francis Scott Key’s Frederick. John Whittier’s. Lee’s, Grant’s. Located on the cusp of a pass through the Appalachians, the town had changed hands several times during the Civil War. Each time, the citizenry had filled the streets to cheer whichever conquering army happened to be marching through. This fact had always struck me as telling. Even during our most brutal, existential war, most Americans didn’t care enough to stick their necks out for the cause.
We drove through the north side of town. I watched familiar scenes through the glare of my window seat: the ice rink where I had taken my first date and played countless games of hockey in high school, my favorite used bookshop, the liquor store owned by the Pakistanis who never carded. I caught a glimpse of myself reflected in a passing SUV. From a distance, I didn’t look half-bad. The only thing off was the size of my head: swollen, as if it had been stung by a thousand bees.
On the horizon was a familiar set of industrial-looking buildings. I got Sleed’s attention and pointed them out. “Fort Detrick,” I said. “They do testing on monkeys there.”
“What kinda testing?” he asked.
“Chemical and biological weapons. They have a big incinerator where they burn the dead monkeys.”
“How you know that?”
“My dad works there.”
“You never told me he was Army.”
“He’s not, anymore. Civilian contractor.”
The first time my parents had come to visit after I’d arrived at Walter Reed, my father had given me a check for twenty thousand dollars. “Starting out money,” he’d called it.
Fire and Forget Page 17