Just Another Soldier

by Jason Christopher Hartley

  The power lines tore the bird up a bit, doing damage that the recovery guys said would cost about twenty million dollars to fix. Ouch. After night fell, the Apache was carried back to its base by a Chinook.

  August 5, 2004

  “NOBODY FUCKING MOVE!”

  You know that scene in so many bad movies where the car is teetering on the edge of a cliff and everyone inside freezes and tries to find a way safely out without tipping the balance of the car and causing it to go over the edge? I can now (kinda) add that to my list of unbelievable things I never thought I’d ever experience. Out on patrol last night, we’re driving beside a large canal on a small dirt road when suddenly—BANG!—we hit a large outlet from the canal that juts out into the middle of the road. This is just one of the things that can happen when you drive with the lights off, night-vision goggles or not. Almost half the Humvee was hanging over the edge, but we weren’t quite to the “teetering” point. Regardless, once we came to a complete stop, and since I was sitting in the seat at the opposite end of the balance point, I actually had to stop and think about whether or not I should get out. It was a major canal and if the Humvee flipped, everyone inside would almost certainly drown. Hell, even without being trapped in a ten-thousand-pound armored vehicle, the body armor we wear alone would cause you to sink faster than Jimmy Hoffa in cement shoes. Thank god we weren’t going very fast. All I want is to die in a cool way, preferably when I’m really damn old. Drowning in some shitty canal in this dumb country is not cool.

  August 7, 2004

  I STILL DEAD CIVILIANS (WELL, THESE AREN ’T QUITE DEAD )

  One of my battalion’s responsibilities is to patrol a large segment of an oil pipeline. The pipeline runs through an area where there’s a whole lot of nothing. Just flat dirt from horizon to horizon. Why anyone would live out there is beyond me, but there are a few shitty little houses here and there.

  Last night my platoon ran a patrol along a segment of the pipeline. The mission was simple. Drive out to the pipeline at night, park the Humvees, a few guys dismount from the vehicles and walk a few miles, then the Humvees pick them up and we drive back. Our platoon leader explained all this and what we would do if we were to encounter the evildoers who like to attack the pipeline. Then he said, “Look, guys, we all know the chances of us actually catching anyone out there is, like, zero. The only chance of us getting shot at out there is if there’s some farmer who thinks we’re cattle thieves, and we’ll probably just end up wasting his whole family. But that’s okay. Whatever.”

  So there I am, out in the middle of nowhere, there’s no moon and it’s dark as hell. We’re walking along on the uneven furrows of hard-packed dirt in a wedge formation, trying not to trip while we watch the ground through our night-vision goggles. I have Cesar on one side of me and Orlando on the other, both of them with SAWs. There are a lot of dogs that roam around these areas, and there were about half a dozen going berserk barking. It’s pointless trying to achieve any kind of stealth through noise discipline when you have a pack of dogs announcing your position to the world. I could tell that Cesar was nervous about how close one of the dogs was getting to him, and Matt even pulled out his pistol. Then in the distance I heard someone whistle loudly. The dogs stopped barking and scurried away. That was nice, I thought, These dogs must belong to this guy who has gotten them to shut up and come back to the house.

  Then I heard a familiar metallic sound. Kuh-chunk. I looked over toward the sole structure in this absurdly empty land of dirt and I could barely make out someone in a white man-dress holding a rifle pointed up diagonally. I knew what was coming next. Boom! The muzzle flash and the bang were not quite simultaneous. He was probably 150 meters to the left of us. I went down to one knee and started deliberating whether or not I wanted to shoot back. I knew most likely this guy just wanted to scare off whoever was lurking around his home, but I thought, Then again, this is the same story we’re always told when farmers shoot at us. This thought process went on for about one second, then Brrraaaaaaappp! Cesar let off a long burst with his SAW. Then a few other rifles immediately started to chime in. I saw the guy with the gun run around to the back of the house. I thought to myself, Okay, I guess we’re shooting. The hell if I’m gonna miss out on this. I rotated Wazina’s selector lever from safe to semi, looked through the Aimpoint, put the green dot on the roof of the house, and squeezed the trigger. Click. What the…?

  When you load and reload the same round at the top of a magazine over and over again, a slight dimple starts to form on the primer from the firing pin hitting it slightly each time it’s loaded. I guess when the dimple gets deep enough and the firing pin hits it for real, it may not be enough pressure to ignite the primer. Whatever the reason, my first round fired in “combat” was a dud. This was very disappointing, and frankly quite frightening. I assure you this will never happen again. I charged another round, aimed at the roof, and fired. I have to admit that it really felt good to finally shoot.

  Cesar was really going off with his SAW. I yelled to him, “Don’t shoot at them!” At the moment I didn’t know how to best explain to him that I wanted him to shoot, just so long that it wasn’t actually at anyone. I didn’t believe the guy with the gun was much of a threat, and I didn’t want to kill him per se, but I saw no reason not to suppress him. I continued to fire rounds into and over the roof of the house. I noticed that most everyone else’s tracers were also going over the roof. I don’t know if this is because they were thinking the same thing I was or they just didn’t know how to shoot at night very well. When it’s dark and you don’t aim properly, your rounds always tend to go high, it’s a known fact. Anyway, this shooting the roof thing felt really stupid, so I scanned for a better target. The windows? No. The car? No, no one’s trying to use it and no one’s even standing anywhere near it. The tractor? No. Goddammit, there’s nothing worth shooting! I put a few more rounds into the roof, then the lieutenant called a cease-fire.

  The lieutenant yelled to me, “Fire an HE!”

  I thought to myself, HE? Are you kidding me? Isn’t that a little overkill? So I yelled back, “HE?”

  “No! No! Illum! Illum!” he yelled back emphatically.

  Oh, illum. Okay, that makes more sense. Shit, I thought he said HE. I called back, “Illum comin’ up!” loaded an illumination round into the 203, and—Doonk!—fired it into the air. POP. As the flare ignited and hung in the air, all the nothing in front of us became more visible.

  The lieutenant again calls to me, “Start bounding your team!” From here we performed a textbook example of clearing an objective. The two teams bounded one after the other toward the house. My team moved to a flanking position as overwatch, and the other team cleared the house. By then the vehicles had moved up to our position. I then moved my team, and we cleared the remainder of the property while trying not to get gored by the bull in the backyard.

  There were four men, one AK-47, and a ton of women and children. Apparently Allah didn’t will any of the bullets to hit the family that night (thank god), except for a few fragments of one that struck one of the young men in the chin. He bled on his man-dress a bit, but he was fine. We seized the rifle, but we didn’t detain anyone.

  The scene was the same as it always is when we raid homes: The men were fairly collected, the oldest woman wept, wailed, and beat herself, and the young boy was ecstatic at the sight of soldiers. I took pictures of all the men. Then the youngest boy tugged on my sleeve. He didn’t want to be left out; he wanted to have his picture taken, too. As I pointed the camera at him, he did just like the men had and he tried to put on as serious a face as possible. After the picture was taken, he went back to hyperactively running around like he was at Disneyland.

  We then gave them a box of MREs, a box of bottled water, and tried as hard as possible to emote, “Sorry we almost wasted your family. Please take this gift of food and water as a consolation.”

  August 18, 2004

  THE CUTEST GIRL IN QATAR

  In
retrospect I’m not sure if I would have been better off going to Man Lake. It’s not like you have a choice when you’re sent on a four-day pass whether you’ll go to Camp Chili’s, in Qatar, or to the resort in northern Iraq known as Man Lake (but sometimes also called Dick Island). During the orientation that preceded the few days I’d spend at Camp Chili’s (actually named something completely forgettable), I was given a map of the base with very little actual information on it. You aren’t allowed to make notes on the map, nor are you allowed to write down building numbers for fear that if an annotated map fell into enemy hands, the enemy might be able to mount a coordinated attack once he knew which building number went with which rectangle.

  Impressively, the base in Qatar is built entirely around a Chili’s restaurant. This is where soldiers on pass end up eating almost every meal. But just as the lingerie section of AAFES shopping catalogs sent to soldiers in the Middle East are devoid of any actual photographs of non–burqa-wearing women and are replaced by more empty gray rectangles, the Chili’s is devoid of any pork products. Every day a new group of hungry soldiers shows up on their first day of pass. They’ve been fed canned corn daily for months, like caged veal. They get off the shuttle bus singing, “I want my babybackbabybackbabyback ribs,” only to sit down at a table and open a morbidly abridged menu and proclaim, “No ribs? Are you shittin’ me? And what the fuck is beef bacon?!”

  Adjacent to Chili’s is a good-size pool, surrounded by an eight-foot-high brick wall. This walled-off area is part of a small campus of buildings, all of which are surrounded by a high chain link fence with armed guards acting as sentinels at the sole entrance to this complex that sits at the heart of the post. The guard duties at the entrance are performed by an alternating roster of unbelievably sloppy-looking overaged contractors with hillbilly accents and missing teeth and overzealous underage fresh-faced pogue Army privates who think that obstinately standing in my way as I approach the gate is good soldiering. There’s only one entrance into the inner sanctum of the walled Chili’s/pool area, and even that entrance is obscured by another wall, making a T-shaped infiltration route. Once within the wall, the pool acts as a water obstacle, preventing a direct approach to Chili’s from the entrance and forcing any would-be attackers to file around the pool and through all the deck chair obstacles, another tactical genius stroke. Central Command is located at Camp Chili’s (seriously), and I suspect that the super-secret entrance to their massive underground command center and Bat Mobile garage is through the kitchen’s walkin freezer. I did not note any of this on my map, however.

  The thing about going to Qatar on pass is you can count on seeing females who will also be on pass. Forget what you may think about pass being a time to relax, because it simply isn’t. It’s just as stressful as not being on pass, because all that matters is getting laid. At Man Lake, the other “resort,” you may be able to have your own room in the hotel, which is a godsend in that you’ll finally be able to masturbate in privacy, but instead of the male-to-female ratio being twenty to one, as it is at Camp Chili’s, it’s something more like a hundred to one. At Camp Chili’s you’re allowed three beers a night, but at Man Lake alcohol is prohibited. At Camp Chili’s you can go off post for certain activities, but at Man Lake you wouldn’t want to go off post even if you could because you’re still in Iraq. Keep in mind that while at Man Lake you still have to have your chemical suit with you in the event of a chemical weapons attack. I’ve always found it difficult to relax while wearing my protective mask.

  When you leave to go on pass, you’re stuck with whoever else from your base happens to be going at the same time. If you’re lucky, you’ll get put with cool guys, but you could always get stuck with total assholes, too. I lucked out by getting put with guys who were really easy to get along with. The senior man in our group was a fair-skinned, red-haired E-6 mortars sergeant named Earl, from another one of the infantry companies. There was this enormous Puerto Rican kid named Karl, who was a Bradley gunner, and also with us was one of the fuel specialists, a slightly off-center eccentric named Lawrence.

  Before flying to Qatar, we had to spend a day at the Balad Air Base, where soldiers can in-process, withdraw cash, and take care of whatever tasks they need to before flying to their pass destination. This base is probably the biggest one in Iraq and considered a luxury resort by Iraq base standards. But the real crown jewel of the base is the Olympic-size swimming pool—easily five times the size of the pool in Qatar. When the Army first took over the base, the pool was a shambles, and from what the contractor who oversaw the reconstruction project told me, there was actually a broken jet in the empty pool when they found it. The four of us agreed that our main goal of the day was to spend as much time as possible at the pool after our errands were done.

  First we went to Finance to get some money. Apparently the process of visiting the Finance Department can get really ugly, so there are a lot of very explicit rules to follow to keep the procedure organized should the place get swamped with people with welfare checks or whatever. Take this form, sit here, fill the form out, stand up, walk here, wait, when called upon walk here, stand, wait, place the completed form on the counter, recite the alphabet backward, perform the Masonic handshake on the Resuscitation Annie lying on the table, then wait for further instructions from the Führer. Never being very good at this sort of thing, I botched the whole process repeatedly. There was no line this day, so I walked right in and said, “Excuse me, I—” “Did you fill out a form? Go outside and fill one out!” the sergeant major behind the desk bellowed. So I retreated back out the door, took a form from the stand, sat down, and filled it out. Then I walked back inside, and asked, “Okay, so I have a question—” “Wait outside until you’re called!” he barked. Um, okay. So I stood outside the door. “Next!” he called. Trying to start over, I said, “Hi. I was wondering—” “Take off your sunglasses!” der Führer demanded. By this time, my cage was fairly rattled, and I felt like I was at boot camp again, a feeling I don’t particularly care for. Because of my strict patriarchal upbringing, I sometimes have a tendency to switch into submissive mode when I encounter authoritarians, and when I catch myself doing it I get really pissed at myself for letting another quasi-father figure subjugate me. A lot of things ran through my head that I wanted to say. “Sergeant Major, I’ve been in the Army for thirteen years and I’ve been on this shitbird deployment for nearly a year. We’re both NCOs and I don’t appreciate you addressing me like I’m a basic trainee. So why don’t you take this form I’ve so diligently filled out, put your little scribble on it or whatever, and send me on my way. And I’m gonna leave my sunglasses on and you’re gonna like it, got it? Oh, and by the way, fuck off, you fascist fuck.” I didn’t actually say this, but instead I compacted it all into one handy phrase as I removed my sunglasses. “ROGER THAT.” I handed him my form, he scrutinized it with a look on his face like I had filled it out with a pink crayon, he stamped it, then handed a stub to me and told me to see the sergeant at the payment window. “ROGER THAT,” I told him again, hoping he’d clearly understand that I was saying, “FUCK YOU!”

  I took the stub to the window, and the young black female sergeant asked me warmly and very deliberately, as if it were the first time she had ever asked it, “So how are you doing today, Sergeant?” I wanted to say, “Are you fucking kidding me? How am I doing? Your boss just made me feel like a piece of shit and now you think it’s funny to rub salt in my wounds under the guise of friendly euphemisms? You’re either more sadistic than your Nazi boss, or you’re fucking retarded!” But she smelled good, and it made me wonder what her hair would feel like touching my nose and lips, and if she was the kind of girl who would let me stick my finger up her big ghetto booty while I made out with her. She had long painted nails that were nowhere near being within military regulations, but I imagined no one in her chain of command ever said shit to her about it because they were all trying to get into her pants, too. I can’t stand nails like that, but I didn’t
really care, I’d just make her wear boxing gloves while we had our Oreo sex. I was already mentally through the first several weeks of the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom with her before I caught myself and realized I hadn’t answered her question yet. “I’m good,” I replied perfunctorily. As she counted the money, a guy in civilian clothes on the other side of the wall from her teased her about something. She giggled because of him, and I felt a slight pang of jealousy. I hadn’t even started chatting this girl up yet and I was already being cock-blocked. Damn.

  The next stop was to get a few items at the PX and then to get a haircut. None of us four had swim trunks and there were limited options on the racks, so we actually had to coordinate who was going to buy which trunks so that we wouldn’t be caught hanging out at the pool wearing the same shorts the way old married couples wear matching jogging outfits. Among us, we bought all the trunks available, some nonmatching towels, some slightly cold Gatorade, beef jerky, magazines, DVDs, and an assortment of other useless garbage, as soldiers always do when given the chance.

  With bulging plastic shopping bags in tow, we made a stop at the barber in the same building. I had already administered a self-inflicted haircut two days earlier, something I’d mastered over the years as a way to save money and time and to prevent any girls from ever wanting to talk to me, but I accompanied the other guys as they got theirs cut. When Karl took off his uniform blouse in preparation to get his hair cut, my mouth literally went slack. He stood a good six foot three, about an inch taller than me, and the muscles of his back hung off his neck and shoulders like enormous cuts of beef brisket. His shoulders and arms were constructed entirely of long, lean muscles that were casually draped around his skeleton with an elegance of form that inspired in me acute feelings of fear and envy. The outlines of all this muscular mass tapered down into the waistline of his pants, making his torso into a trapezoidal shape, the likes of which I’ve seen only on He-Man action figures. It’s moments like this in a heterosexual man’s life when there is a staggering confusion that comes over him as he struggles to determine if he wants to fuck this guy or be this guy. But more important, how was I going to get any girlie attention when I was anywhere near this steroidal monster? Then a brief moment of pride came over me knowing that this guy with the amazing body was my buddy; he was with me. Wait, this is all totally gay stuff to think. I don’t want to think this! Yuck! I repulse myself! But, Jesus, look at those muscles! I have to look away. I don’t want to get caught staring. I can’t help it, I have to look. Jesus! Would you look at that! Then I caught a glance of my reflection in one of the barber’s mirrors, and I was brutally reminded that I have a fifteen-inch neck and that my six-foot-two frame weighs only 165 pounds. I sat down in one of the chairs in the waiting area and hoped that no one would notice the skinny kid in the Army uniform.