Just Another Soldier

by Jason Christopher Hartley

  Just before the transfer of power took place in Iraq, we had a very big operation planned in the small town where we worked. One of the most powerful men there was a cleric who lived in a mosque in the center of town. He had ties with Al Qaeda and pulled a lot of political weight in town. I don’t know all the details about who he was and what he had his hands in, but I know he was considered a “high-value target” and had to go. This was the guy we had hoped to nab from one of the town meetings, who never showed, so it was decided that we would raid the mosque in which he lived.

  This operation was by far the biggest thing we’d been involved in on this deployment. There were a few homes in town that were going to be raided at precisely the same moment that we’d perform the raid on the mosque. Willy’s platoon would do one of the homes, and it was my platoon’s job to do the mosque, but eventually the raid itself was given to Special Forces. This was a bit of a disappointment, but I suspect the politics of the situation were a consideration. The raid was actually performed by the Iraqi National Guard, a team trained by Special Forces, with only a few A-team guys actually taking part. My platoon was given the task of providing a cordon for the mosque, which basically means preventing anyone from leaving or getting near the mosque during the raid.

  I don’t normally get very nervous before operations, but this one was a recipe for disaster. There was a lot of suspicion that enemy activity would increase as the transfer of power neared, and I couldn’t imagine the townsfolk taking too kindly to us barging into their mosque in the center of their town. In this case, the raids would take place about an hour before dawn. That way the streets would not be crowded, and if things got funky, we wouldn’t have to wait long for daylight. When we heard that the raid on the mosque was going to be done by the ING, we all collectively groaned. Most all the ING soldiers we’d seen were such utter shitbags (the platoons we trained were actually half-decent), the idea of a complicated raid being performed by them was completely preposterous. In the mission briefing, when we were told that an ING team was doing the raid, we were advised that their faces would be wrapped. This is a key bit of information because normally we are told to shoot people carrying rifles who have their faces wrapped. Then the rumor got started that the guys doing the raid would actually be Army Rangers dressed to look like ING. That way, the spin on the story could be that the raid was done by Iraqis, not American infidels ignoring the transfer of power and hell-bent on soiling sacred places of worship.

  Once all the vehicles and units were staged early in the morning prior to the mission, I took a walk to the truck the raid team was on to see if they really were Americans dressed up to look like Iraqis. But, alas, they were all Iraqis. I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not. Then I took a walk over to Willy’s vehicle. He was with Cesar and a few other guys I knew from our original unit in New York. I have to admit that it makes me jealous when I find him bullshitting with the guys in his platoon and I have to step in like some fucking outsider because I’m in a different platoon. Normally he and I were inseparable, but our commander made it a point to put us in different platoons when they made up the platoon rosters before our deployment. At first I thought that maybe this was a good thing, to let us “grow” separately with different soldiers under our leadership, but I’ve since changed my mind about that, and I’m just plain resentful that I finally got to go into combat with Willy and had to be in a different platoon from him. Anyway, I forget what we talked about, but when I left to go back to my vehicle he told me, “See ya later, little buddy.” For years it would drive me up a wall whenever he called me “little buddy,” like I was some sort of subordinate to him. But when I finally told him I hated it, he told me it was supposed to be a Gilligan’s Island reference. After thinking about this, I realized that it was pretty goddamned funny. After all, his resemblance to the Skipper and mine to Gilligan were somewhat uncanny. I don’t mind it so much anymore.

  Once all the vehicles left our base, it looked pretty impressive. Normally when we go out on missions, we usually take between four and eight vehicles. For this operation, we had an absurd amount of firepower with several dozen vehicles. We rolled out with Abramses, Bradleys, more Humvee gunships than I could count, five-ton trucks full of additional dismounted guys, along with Apaches and Kiowas as overwatch. Most of the brawn that tagged along was for in the event that things went sideways, à la Black Hawk Down.

  Once we came to the town, each team of vehicles broke off in different directions. My platoon was going to approach the town from a small dirt road off the highway, but we got a little lost trying to find the turn, something that really sucks when you have several vehicles all following the same lead. I was thinking that if we couldn’t do something as simple as find the right turnoff on the way to the raid, we were in for a world of hurt once things actually got more complex.

  Synchronization among all the teams was an important aspect of this undertaking, and we were a few minutes ahead of schedule, so we quietly parked all the vehicles on the dirt road just outside of town. We could see the mosque’s minaret, only a few hundred meters away. I was pretty amped, and having to wait gave me time to think about all the things that could go wrong. I thought about a mob of people with torches and pitchforks blocking the road. I thought about IEDs exploding beside us on the way in. I thought about all the homes clustered around the mosque crammed full of women and children and the men who all had AK-47s under their beds. So I did an idiot check on my rifle to make sure there was a round in the chamber. Checked my Aimpoint to make sure I could see the red dot through my night vision (which appeared green). Checked my night vision to make sure it was mounted securely on my helmet. Put my hand where I had the 40mm illumination flares in my vest, then where I had the high-explosive 40mm grenades—although the two look completely different, you wouldn’t want to mix them up and load HE when you wanted illumination. I visualized exactly how I’d load a round into the tube. I visualized changing magazines. I visualized a man on a roof pointing a rifle at me. I visualized putting the green dot on his chest and squeezing the trigger.

  Two minutes out. The vehicles started up and we made our approach into town. There were more trucks on the roads in town than I expected. There were a few men here and there doing god knows what at this time of day. The area around the mosque was clear—no legion of activists performing a human shield sit-in, no candlelight vigils, no platoon of Sadr’s men. My Humvee stopped next to the front gate of the mosque and I dismounted along with Kirk and Whiskey. The three of us crept down the tight alley adjacent to the outer wall of the mosque, our sector for the duration of the raid. I peeked into a window of a home and saw six people sleeping side by side on the floor. The alley opened up to the left. I scanned around the corner. Multiple doors, multiple windows, an area around the wall to the left that I couldn’t see behind, two spaces between buildings I couldn’t see down either, a half-stripped car. The buildings in front of us had two levels, and each level had a roof. The alley continued between an apartment complex and another house. To our right was the back door out of the mosque courtyard. We were to kill or capture anyone who might try to engage us from any of these buildings, anyone approaching through the alley, or anyone fleeing out the back door. For three guys in a small alley, this was a total shit sandwich. With my thumb on my weapon’s safety, I scanned door, window, door, window, roof, door, roof, window, alley, roof, door.

  Then CRASH! A Humvee rammed the front gate of the mosque then pulled back, and the ING team poured into the courtyard. A few shotgun blasts (to breach the inner door), some yelling, then footsteps on the roof of the mosque. I couldn’t really watch any of this. All I could do was listen, which can be a lot scarier. A Special Forces guy came out the back door, looked around, nodded to us, then went back in. It looked like the ING guys had gotten their man without incident. So far so good.

  Then, not far away, there were a few bursts of automatic fire, and some tracers streamed into the night sky. At first I thought it
might be one of the vehicles in the cordon, but it was a little farther away than that. There were a few more shots, then silence. I looked back at Whiskey and said, “Who the fuck was that?” Then I remembered that Third Platoon’s objective was in that direction. That bastard! If Willy made contact before me I’m gonna be so pissed. It had to be Willy. Shit. Since our deployment began, Willy and I have been competing to see who would make enemy contact first. I was part of the convoy that drove up from Kuwait, so I thought I’d win for sure with that movement, but it ended up being a completely uneventful trip.

  A minute or two later and we were back in our Humvee and on our way out of town. I was impressed that the raid had gone as quickly and smoothly as it had, and surprised that the target individual had even been there. I had bet Kirk five bucks that he wouldn’t be, and when we were back in our seats, he yelled at me, “Ha ha! Pay up, motherfucker!”

  There was no word over the radio of any casualties, so none of us knew what the fired shots had been about. Once I finally had a chance to talk to Willy and some of the other guys in his platoon, I got the whole story.

  Willy’s platoon has a thing for performing breaches on outer gates by chaining the gates to a Humvee and pulling them down. So on this raid, Willy’s squad is stacked on the outer wall by the gate, and they’ve hooked the gate to the Humvee. But this time when they let ’er rip, instead of the gate coming down, the whole goddamned wall came down.

  Onto Willy and Cesar. Willy said that he could see the wall coming down on top of him like it was in slow motion, but there wasn’t anything he could do. There was no way to move out of its way fast enough. Willy is one big motherfucker, and there isn’t much in the way of physical force that can phase him, and his tolerance for pain is completely ridiculous, but he told me, “That brick wall coming down on me rocked my world. That shit really hurt.” Cesar is not a big guy but is smart enough that when he stacks, he’s right on Willy’s ass. Willy says this sometimes really bothers him, to have this little guy basically crawling up his butt when they’re on raids, but I can understand the desire to want to be as close as you can to Willy when you know things are going to get hairy.

  “Man down, man down!” Willy and Cesar’s squad leader was freaking out. Although the wall had rung his bell, Willy managed to summon his retard-strength and force his way out of the rubble with Cesar. When he realized that the “man down” shit was about him, he got pissed and just kept yelling, “I’m good! I’m good!” The body armor we wear can really suck sometimes, but Willy said what really saved his ass were the ceramic plates in the armor and his knee pads. And what saved Cesar’s ass was going down next to Willy. Once they got it together, the raid continued, even though Willy said he doesn’t remember the next several minutes. Willy’s squad leader tried to get him to sit out the rest of the mission, but Willy just kept saying, “I’m good, I’m good!”

  Willy kicks in the front door and stumbles in with his team, reeling like a drunk. Once inside, they find a large door that the other team is unable to kick open. “Get the ram!” someone yells. Still pissed about the wall and not about to let some stupid door ruin his flow, Willy runs into it full force with his shoulder, and it bursts open. Willy has been perfecting the one-man breach-entry technique.

  After the building was cleared, Willy and Cesar came back out to the front of the house. From the rooftop of an adjacent building, a man fired a burst at them with an AK. Cesar immediately returned fire with his SAW (arguably saving Willy’s ass), the rounds zipping off the low wall around the roof and barely missing the guy as he ducked, and Willy took cover behind an outhouse. Since the rounds were directed toward Willy and he didn’t want to expose himself too much, he put his rifle over the top of the shitter, Vietnam style, and shot back blindly. Then one of the Humvee-mounted M240s opened up, raking the roof with a stream of 7.62mm. This deterred the guy enough from firing again. Another soldier from Willy’s platoon was on the roof of the cleared building. He had clear line of sight to the guy with the AK and looked right at him. Instead of shooting him, he yelled, “Freeeeeeze! Don’t mooooove!” The guy then ran across to another roof, dumped the gun, and disappeared into the dark.

  A few days later, Third Platoon raided the same house again. The demolished brick wall had been replaced with a spanking brand-new super-strong cinder-block wall. This time when the gate was pulled by the chain, the entire wall came down in one solid piece, missing flattening a soldier by a few inches.

  July 10, 2004

  UXO, EOD, WTF

  There is an incredible amount of unexploded ordnance in Iraq, and the method in which it is discovered varies. A lot of the time locals will report it. Sometimes they’ll point it out while we’re out on patrols, and sometimes we find cache sites when locals rat each other out. Sometimes we’ll find it on our own, either from patrols on the ground or from aviation units that spot it. And of course there are times that UXOs are found the hard way. Not long ago, there were some local contractors on our base cutting steel with a blowtorch. What they were cutting was on the ground, and just below the surface were some armor-piercing rounds. The torch hit a round and it exploded, injuring a few of the men. One guy caught some shrapnel in his neck and was bleeding. Rather than waiting for us to give him a ride to the hospital, he grabbed a cab and caught a ride into Baghdad. (Sometimes Iraqis do some pretty punk rock stuff. Baghdad is a bit of a commute from our base.) Regardless of how the UXO is found, collecting it is usually a matter of the EOD guys driving out to the site, picking it up, and putting it in their truck. Recently, an empty field was discovered to be full of buried UXOs, apparently left there by Republican Guard when they hightailed it out of their camp during the invasion. We escorted EOD to the field. They then dug all the UXOs up with a backhoe. (This is usually when I put a Humvee between myself and the EOD guys. EOD is the only unit that seems to wear the Kevlar groin protection religiously.)

  Once EOD has collected enough UXOs, they load them all into a dump truck and we escort them out to a remote area to destroy the ordnance. While they prepare everything, we create a security perimeter around their work area with our Humvees.

  On this particular day, the temperature was well into the stupid hot range, and simply sitting in our Humvees while EOD prepared to detonate their stash was incredibly painful. So I took a walk over to the massive pit where they were working to ask them if they could possibly work any fucking slower. When I saw the quantity of explosives they had amassed in the pit, I changed my mind. I told them that I intended to bust their balls for working so slowly, then I told them that on second thought they could take all the time they wanted. A lot of the stuff they were handling looked unstable as hell, and I didn’t want to be anywhere near it. On the walk back to my Humvee, I noticed something smoking. Like an idiot I walked toward it and realized that it was an artillery round with its ass end on fire. I didn’t know what the hell to make of this, other than the fact that it was probably dangerous. I later found out it was most likely a white phosphorus incendiary round. It scared the shit outta me. I ran (sorta for my life) back to my Humvee and backed it way the hell away from the flaming ordnance. That’s how hot it was: shit-spontaneously-combusting hot.

  July 16, 2004

  APACHE DOWN

  Today we got a call to help recover a vehicle that had run over a land mine. This is the first land mine I’ve seen detonated in the traditional running-over-it method. Sometimes tank mines are used in IEDs, but they are usually rigged for command detonation. In this case, the mine was a type that didn’t really contain or create much shrapnel, so these guys lost a tire on their Humvee and that’s basically it. No one was hurt.

  On the way back to our base with the disabled Humvee, we got a call that there was an Apache down. We were all like, “What? Apache down? Are you kidding me? Is that supposed to be some kind of joke?” But apparently it was real. It was frustrating as hell because we were the nearest unit to the Apache, and not knowing what the situation was exactly, we ass
umed the worst and wanted to get there as soon as possible. But we had a tow truck with us carrying this stupid blown-up Humvee, and couldn’t move very quickly. We finally managed to pass the tow truck off onto another unit that responded, and we moved out to the site of the crash.

  Once we’d made it to the crash site, we found both the Apache pilots, and they were fine. One immediately started telling us about how someone on the ground had fired a rocket at them, and when they did the evasive-action thing, they ran into some high-tension power lines. They definitely clipped some power lines, two different sets to be exact, but no one seemed to buy their “guy with a rocket” story. I felt pretty bad for these guys, especially when the brigade commander flew in wanting to know what the hell had happened to one of his birds.