I suppose I should mention the Time magazine article. (I wish I could be mentioning a New York Times magazine article instead.) Since you are terribly sophisticated and would never normally read Time unless someone happened to leave a copy in the restroom, let me be the first to tell you that they mentioned me. It was an article on blogs (dated June 21, 2004), and Just Another Soldier was the only one mentioned as a military blog. It was mentioned that I had wandered through one of Saddam’s empty palaces. Um, I didn’t do that, I wandered through Uday’s non-empty palace. Close enough for mass media, I suppose. But hey, who I am to bite the hand that feeds me, right? I seriously don’t know why they mentioned me. But hey, who cares! We have fun in my blog! If you want news about Iraq, congratulations, you’ve come to the wrong fucking place! If you are distrustful of the media and want to know exactly what’s going on in Iraq, you’ll have to pray for divine enlightenment, because only god knows what the hell is going on over here! But I can’t really help you with that either, because I don’t believe in god (or at least not in the traditional sense), and I think the phrase “There are no atheists in foxholes” is semantic proof that “god” is essentially a construct borne of necessity, in fact I regularly ridicule Christian doctrine. This is only natural because I am a recovering Mormon.
However, if you want to know how it feels to be a soldier in Iraq, to hear something honest and raw—that I can help you with. There is so much to discuss! Urban warfare tactics! Killing civilians! MASTURBATION!
But hey, I’m a madman, a clown prince, a heretic. I am most likely out of my mind. I mean, seriously, what kind of an asshole joins the infantry?
My platoon went into town with our company commander recently to perform a number of short tasks. I suppose I lack the ability to take anything seriously because everything we do just seems so…well, funny. It’s not to say that what we do isn’t important. We do many good and sometimes necessary and important things. It’s just that sometimes, when you stop and think about it, like I do every time I write, you notice how humorous everything is. I started my day by going through the remains of an air-defense artillery site we had bombed, sifting through piles of unexploded ordnance, picking up explosive fuses to prevent someone from coming along and…picking them up. They’re explosive, you know!
Most of the ordnance exploded when the site was destroyed, but the fuses that screw into the nose of the shells contain a small amount of explosives and can be dangerous, particularly to all the kids who play in the area. “This goes against everything we learned about UXOs [unexploded ordnance],” Matt remarked. What he meant was our training taught us to not mess with unexploded ordnance, ever.
Everywhere we go, we get mobbed by kids. They are impossible to get rid of. What makes it really complicated is that they commonly have really cool shit to sell. Like today, one of them sold Matt a Bench-made automatic, a knife that sells for $180 in the PX, but here he bought it for thirty bucks. They mob, annoy, and insult us to no end; they steal knives, pens, and sunglasses right off our vests; they steal cameras and GPS devices out of Humvees; and they basically make it impossible for us to do our jobs. Later in the day, I would whack one of these kids in the shin hard with an Asp baton in an attempt to get him to go away, but it didn’t work. His response was basically, “Dude, that really hurt. Why’d you do that? I’m not gonna leave you alone.” I got in a staring contest with another kid—and lost. Just like the detainees we commonly deal with, they know how to posture, they have the macho front routine down pat, they even know how to take a beating, but they will flip into abject apology mode in an instant if it suits their purposes. If they’re not shamelessly begging us for food and water, they’re spitting at us. I’m no sociologist, but this behavior seems endemic of Arab culture.
Our next two stops were to a couple of the poorest families in the area. We dropped off some food for them. None of the men were there when we came by, so very little organization was imposed on how to disseminate the goods. The children disputed bitterly and sometimes violently.
The next stop was an abandoned set of buildings in which four families were living. In the seventies, these buildings were a clubhouse for the town’s semi-pro soccer team. But after some of the people in the area attempted to assassinate Saddam, he decimated the town. The soccer field was destroyed, and the clubhouse was converted into an air-defense artillery site. These families were using the buildings to house a group of water buffalo and about a dozen cute little snot-nosed ankle-biters.
Our company commander is an assistant district attorney in Manhattan. He is the kind of guy who uses terms like “broad” and “fella.” In my humble opinion, he is the only sane man in our command structure. We trust him. And he’s no dummy. He made sure to take his helmet and sunglasses off before offering an open packet of Pringles to an Iraqi girl because, you see, the civil affairs guys were snapping pictures of everything he did.
A common task for us is to record the daily prayers broadcast over the loudspeakers at the local mosques, to see if they contain anti-coalition messages. It was a Thursday, so of course someone was getting married. Today the celebratory gunfire was very close and a bit excessive. “Hold your fire, men! It’s celebratory fire!” our commander barked. Every time someone says, “celebratory,” all I hear is “celibatory.” Then the ICDC came on the scene, right into my sector of fire! Moments later, a shiny new car drove by all covered in colored ribbons, trailed by a bus full of singing revelers.
After we were done hanging around the mosque, we secured the town police station while our commander attended a meeting there. The same kids always know where to find us. They are insufferable. They now know elaborate curses in both English and Spanish, most involving them pimping out your sister and mother while you are sucking a dick because you are a piece of shit. Today a kid showed us his push-up prowess. “Schnow” (rhymes with “now”) means “Do push-ups” in Arabic. We gave him a dollar for doing enough to pass an Army physical fitness test.
June 23, 2004
BLOOD AND SOAP
My gloves smell of blood and soap. I washed them yesterday after everything that happened, but instead of just the sweet musky smell of blood—that smell that is both subtly repugnant and strangely appealing, appealing because your viscera knows its own, but repellent because it seems too personal, like the smell of someone else’s sweat or breath—they also have the cheap smell of scented antibacterial soap, a smutty fakery like the aborted attempt of scented tampons to obfuscate the stench of menstrual gore.
Today a good part of my company was involved in a mission to nab a fairly high-profile local politician in a somewhat spectacular manner during a city council meeting in the town where we work. But homeboy never showed up. I was on the secondary snatch team, the guys who would have physically intercepted the target individual should he have chosen a less-expected egress route from the target location. But once we realized that there would be no fandango, we just sorta milled around the dance floor like a bunch of high school chess club kids. So I had a lot of time today to indulge in an obsessive-compulsive and repeated sniffing of my gloves, seeing as how there was no other stimuli to focus on in the madness-inducing heat.
As things become busier as the transfer of authority in Iraq approaches, missions that are normally performed by other companies get passed around to cover the ebb and flow of requisite manpower. Yesterday, about fifteen of us were picking up some slack for another company by checking up on a couple of “named areas of interest.” Essentially this means going to an area where bad guys have been roosting, and nosing around looking for anything less than kosher.
The area was somewhat new to us—something always exciting, being somewhere for the first time. The terrain was dry, hard dirt cut deeply and randomly in places by water. In the abrupt ravines and gullies, tall dense grass grew in stark juxtaposition to the dry ground. After our initial clearing of the area, we poked around in all the abandoned buildings and abandoned fighting positions. After an a
mple amount of dicking around, my lieutenant asked me, “Sergeant, do you have any HE?” (This means, “Do you have any high-explosive rounds for your M203 grenade launcher?”) What? Phft. I was like, “Hellz ya I do, sir. Shit!”
“See that steel and stuff over there?”
“Roger, sir.”
“I think it’s attacking us.”
“Roger that, sir!”
By this time everyone who had a 203 was already instinctively loading rounds. When it comes time to lay down HE, the Force kicks in and you have one in the tube before the Obi Wan in your head can even clear his throat.
I fired first. Doonk! The target was about 150 meters away. I overshot horribly—I don’t have a sight for my 203, so I was using the Force to aim, which happened to fail me miserably on this occasion. BOOM! The ’splosion was cool as shit. None of the other 203 gunners did much better, but all said, it was good training to fire a few live grenades, not to mention a lot of fun. Note to self: Bug the supply sergeant for some fucking quadrant sights for the 203.
You might be thinking that this is going to be a story about soldiers indiscriminately firing a few grenades for no good reason and accidentally hitting some innocent civilians. Well, this is not one of those stories. We were careful and fired into an area that we had just cleared thoroughly of puppies, three-year-old girls, and baby seals. I’ve already written about soldiers killing civilians, and I never wish to do it again.
We mounted up and moved out. It would be a bit of a drive to the next place, so we were expecting a smooth ride through a basically unpopulated area. But before we got far, we saw an Iraqi guy running with a limp toward the road, waving his arms frantically. We were in the middle of nowhere. It looked as though he had come from an area that was nothing but a lot of big gullies. This guy was obviously hurt, and without knowing a single detail, it was clear that somewhere there would be other people hurt. I was the last vehicle in a four-vehicle convoy. We followed the guy as he hobbled back in the direction from where he came. The terrain here was hilly and mostly non-navigable, a real tactical challenge. There were innumerable places for the enemy to engage us from. We were apprehensive as we rolled down into the gully where he led us. We were basically entering a textbook ambush location. Everyone dismounted from the vehicles except for drivers and turret gunners. The natural focus was to get to whoever was hurt, so a lot of the guys started running down the incline. We walked by a blood-soaked rag. It looked like a young boy’s underwear. We couldn’t see anyone yet, but my heart started to race. I started to worry about how bad the injuries would be. I was also worried about our position.
Anytime something draws everyone’s attention, I assume it’s an intentional distraction, and I start looking in some other direction. I worked at John F. Kennedy Airport for a while with the National Guard. I was one of those dicks who just stood there with an M16. Eight hours a day, for eight months, I watched everything that went on at Terminal Four’s security checkpoint. (This happens to be the terminal for the Middle East flights. After September 11, all eyes were on the airborne Arabs and therefore my terminal. But oddly, the Arabs were the well-behaved ones. It was the customers flying on El Al who were the pains in the ass. I could write an entire book titled The Hasidim: The Rudest Fucking People to Ever Walk the Earth.) You want to know how to get something through a checkpoint? Have a girl with big tits put a bag through a scanner that has a set of kitchen knives in it—a gift for grandma. She needs to be wearing something tight and revealing. She needs to be a garrulous coquette. All eyes will be on her cleavage—every Port Authority cop, every soldier, and most of the passengers. With this distraction as your smoke screen, you could pass off a hand grenade as a PalmPilot.
I climbed to the top of the gully and out of the potential kill zone. This is not the part where I tell you something totally unexpected happened. Life can be extraordinarily unoriginal. This is the part where I tell you that we were right. There were two Iraqi men on the ground where the gully turned to the right and opened to a wider area. We ran up, quickly assessed them, and found that they both had gunshot wounds to the upper thigh.
One of the two, a young man probably in his twenties, died before we could begin treatment. “Sergeant, this one’s out.” A large pool of blood had soaked into the ground under his pelvis. It was bright red. Just like we’d been trained, a few guys pushed out a security perimeter while we worked. The question that would perplex me for the rest of the time that we were there was, Where was the gun or guns that shot these guys and who shot them?
Whiskey and I stood over the other man, a potbellied gentleman who I would guess was in his fifties. Someone grabbed the combat lifesaver bags out of the Humvees. We cut the leg off his pants. There was an entry wound on the front of his left thigh. It was a good-size hole, big enough to fit my thumb. The wound was dark red and bloody, but not bleeding profusely. We cut more of his pant leg off to try to find the exit wound. On his inner thigh, close to his groin, there was a hole about twice the size as the first wound. The hole was jagged and it welled with dark blood. I opened a field dressing and got ready to apply it by grabbing the man’s leg. The wound looked soft and fresh and wet, like a bloody macabre vagina. As I lifted his leg, the hole opened slightly, and I thought of sashimi. I was worried that I was hurting the guy. I applied the field dressing to the wound, repeating the same action I had dozens of times in training. Whiskey did the same for the other wound.
There was minimal bleeding at this point, but we had to put a little effort into keeping the guy awake. I put my hand on his chest, looked him in the eye, and told him that he was going to be okay. I felt like an idiot, assuring him in English, but I figured he’d get the point. Why the hell else would a man put his hand over the heart of another man? As we finished up the dressings, a couple of other guys started an IV for him. Giving IVs is not something I know how to do (something I mean to rectify now), so I let them have at it.
I went back over to the guy who was out. He was just lying there, ignored. Maybe he could be resuscitated, maybe he wasn’t all the way dead yet. I wanted to do something, but I couldn’t even decide if I should elevate his feet or his head. I kept thinking that no matter what I elevated, it was just going to make him bleed out faster. I contemplated giving him CPR, but without treating the wound first, I had no inclination to kiss a dead guy and break his sternum with compressions that would only make him bleed out more. But, Jesus, what was the point? He was already dead, I guess; his pants were soaked in blood, as was the ground around him.
His eyes were half open. Being a product of American pop culture, I knew that the thing you were supposed to do now was shut his eyelids, one of those archetypical things that everyone wishes they could do just once in their life but knows they never will, like leaving a small stack of worn cash on a whore’s nightstand. I put my hand over his face and tried to shut his eyelids. They didn’t really move, or they just moved back to the half-shut and dead-looking position. I tried harder. Still not working. Now I was just feeling stupid, it’s not like making him look more like he was asleep instead of dead was going to be giving him any comfort, and frankly I didn’t care how he looked, I just wanted to give him some dignity in death. We grabbed a poncho out of one of the Humvees. I arranged his arms and legs, and we put the poncho over him, tucking it under him. Is it weird that the first time I’ve “tucked someone in,” it’s a dead guy?
The guys were having a little trouble with the old guy’s IV. His veins were basically nonexistent, and I could see, judging from the new blood on his arm, that there had already been a few failed attempts. Had the situation not been so serious, I would have given them shit about this. But I knew they had it in hand—they just needed to give it another try—so I walked over to the first guy, the one who had flagged us down.
This guy had been shot in the calf. His wound had been dressed and we had him drinking water. The temperature in the sun was at least 135 degrees Fahrenheit. I asked him if he was doing all right. Again
, stupid that it’s in English, but I felt that this was one of those times that people understand what you mean regardless of language. He Arabic’d that he was fine, but he was pleading with me to do something for his friend. I stupidly told him that we were. I didn’t know what to say. His eyes welled with tears, and he wiped them away with the same hand that held the bottle of water.
We called in a medevac, but we were denied. I am not the lieutenant, so I don’t know what the conversation was like, but I imagine the message was basically that we don’t provide valuable air assets to local nationals who get hurt. On a human rights level, I find it reprehensible that we had that dumb First Infantry Division motherfucker who shot himself between the toes airlifted out, but a critically injured Iraqi didn’t warrant a bird. However, on a tactical level, I understand that we can’t be tying up vital resources on every Iraqi who decides to get hurt—something that happens too often for us to be giving up Blackhawks.
We put the old guy on a poleless litter and onto the hood of a Humvee. We put the calf guy in one too. Again he asked me (I’m assuming from his gesticulating) to please help his dead friend. I repeatedly assured him that we would put him on the other Humvee. Which was true. But he wasn’t going to want to watch that. The Humvees rolled back up the gully.
No one seemed to really want to deal with the dead guy. This sorta bothered me, but I’m not gonna harp on guys for it. No one wanted to get blood on himself. This is what happens when you have a platoon of soldiers who are all either cops or were raised in the city—they’re all convinced that getting blood on you is the fastest way to catch all manner of untreatable disease. This may be true in New York City, but in Iraq the AIDS rate is like zero-point-zero. I said, “Okay guys, let’s get this guy on the hood.” No one seemed too eager. I didn’t need help yet, so I went to the dead guy and rolled him over so the poncho was under him rather than over him. When I rolled him, it felt like a body, it moved like a body, had the heft of a body, but it was strange to think that this body was no longer a person. It had been a person just a few short minutes ago, but now it was a mass of meat that I was going to throw on the hood of my Humvee like a deer. I tried to think of it as only a body, but I couldn’t help but think that he was a man, and I wanted to respect him as a man. So I chose to not be offended by him or his body or any of its functions. After a little coaxing, I managed to get three guys to grab the ends of the poncho. I tried giving very explicit instructions on how I wanted to get the guy on the hood, but the guys weren’t too stoked on the idea of getting physical with a dead man. Touching a poncho is one thing, but touching a bloody dead body is another. We finally got him on the hood but almost lost him. I was not going to drop this guy on the ground. I yelled at them to stop being squeamish and to just fucking push. I decided that his not falling was more important than his comfort, so once I got him on the front of the hood, I just rolled him up it until he was right in front of the windshield. It wasn’t very graceful, the whole procedure, to say the least. But he didn’t fall. I stayed on the hood with him, along with Justin, our radio guy, for the ride up to the road.
Just Another Soldier Page 11