Just Another Soldier

by Jason Christopher Hartley

  “I’m not even gonna look over at her. What do I care? Let’s just eat.” I was surprised at how much of a baby I was being. I knew I was being absurd, but I couldn’t make the childish feeling go away. I tried my best to enjoy my non-pork dinner.

  Before we finished eating, Chris and Jess came over and sat down next to us. The guys they were sitting with were from their unit. This made me feel a little better. Chris and Jess were fuel specialists, like Lawrence. We talked for a while and agreed to meet up later that night at the bar.

  There are two “bars” at Camp Chili’s. Both are basically just auditoriums that serve canned beer out of buckets of ice. Since there’s a three-beer limit per soldier per night, you have to present your ID to a cashier, who sells you a ticket. Your ID is then scanned and entered into a computer system that is networked between the bars, foiling soldiers from getting three from each bar. One bar plays popular music and is where the younger soldiers hang out. The other plays classic rock and is where the hillbillies and middle-aged soldiers go.

  When we got to the bar, Chris and Jess were already there. As to be expected, there were a bunch of guys hitting on Chris, but they were sitting at a table big enough for the four of us to still be able to sit down. Lawrence, god bless him, sat down on the other side of Chris and just started talking to her. Since they had the same job, he found all sorts of things to converse with her about. Between Lawrence’s innocent fearlessness and Karl’s intimidating physique, the other guys scurried away after a few minutes.

  We stayed at the bar long enough to drink our three beers. In addition to being a fitness nut, Chris was from Michigan and a huge sports fan. This sucked. I’m not exactly a gym rat and I know exactly jack squat about sports. After the bar we went to the coffee shop. Chris told us, without much conviction, that she was married. Her husband was a soldier as well, a National Guardsman also in Iraq, but part of a different unit. There were occasions when his unit would get fuel from her base—the only time they ever got to see each other. The longing, the sense of danger, the fleeting moments together—it had all the elements of a heartbreaking romance. I wasn’t buying the story about their being married, but it was obvious she was in love with the guy and I’m sure they intended to get married, probably once they got back. I knew she was cool with me to the extent of having spent as much time with us as she had, but I sensed that telling me she was married was a load of shit and just something she told guys to make it as clear as possible that she wasn’t single. I had to realize I didn’t stand a chance with her, but it didn’t matter. It was incredibly cool just to be spending time with someone as sweet and attractive as she was. We had almost nothing in common and she was in love with someone else, but now I was fascinated by how utterly wholesome she was.

  Karl and I spent a day off post with a retired sergeant major who worked at the base and sometimes took soldiers around to see the sights. Qatar is one of the cleanest places I have ever been to and in a lot of ways it was very beautiful. But mostly it was depressing. We were in the capital city of Doha, where everything was sterile and Westernized. We drove around for a while, looking at the bay, the amir’s palace, and one of the new opulent hotels. The sergeant major kept asking us if we wanted to go to his apartment to have lunch and maybe to take a nap. We politely declined the offer. I chose to ignore the nap comment. He asked us where we wanted to eat lunch. He said, “There’s Applebee’s, Fuddruckers, Bennigan’s, Ponderosa. McDonald’s, too.” (Applebee’s? Are you fucking kidding me?) Again, we politely declined and asked him if he could take us somewhere locals ate. He was reluctant at first, but then took us to a wonderful little hole-in-the-wall place with tasty traditional Middle Eastern cuisine. Doha is a phenomenally boring city, so after lunch we went to the mall. Were it not for all the men wearing man-dresses and the signs on the stores in Arabic, we might as well have been in the suburbs of New Jersey. All I wanted was to experience Qatar and the Middle East in a traditional way (that didn’t involve combat), but I finally gave up once I saw Starbucks. At this point I knew resistance was futile, so I ordered a latte.

  For the rest of the time we were in Qatar, Karl and I didn’t see Earl or Lawrence that often. Lawrence was the kind of guy who liked to do his own thing and was content spending time alone, while Earl spent most his time at the massage place on post. The girls who worked there were all Filipinas hired by KBR. In fact, almost every worker on post was from the Philippines, apparently a favorite place for KBR to recruit.

  In the evening, Karl and I would usually see Chris and Jess at the bar. It was virtually impossible to have conversations with Chris for more than a few minutes before some guy would interrupt. She was always polite and would humor these fools more than she had to. But I couldn’t really complain, she humored me, too.

  There was one group of guys in particular who Karl and I came to particularly hate. The ring leader was this arrogant prick with reddish-blond hair. He was the handsome one and he looked like a cut-rate Craig Kilborn or Josh Homme. He always had two cronies with him. One was shorter and had large features—big nose, fat lips, big eyes, thick eyebrows. The other was tall and gangly with a droopy eyelid and was always completely expressionless, like an executioner on quaaludes. They were perfect henchmen. The three of them would stroll around the base with the swagger of combat grunts, each with a lip full of tobacco.

  The cut-rate Kilborn and his two droogs spent as much time vying for Chris’s attention as I did with Karl. It was always a battle to see who she’d spend the most time talking to. I had to give the guy props for one thing though. Even though he was hitting on a girl, he would still have dip in his mouth and spit into an empty soda bottle partially full of what looked like diarrhea.

  On the last night before we had to return to Iraq, the battle for female attention was at its peak. It was everyone’s last chance to find someone to fuck. Even if you found someone to hook up with, there was still the problem of finding somewhere to do the deed. There were bomb shelters at various locations on the base constructed of sandbags that were popular with those unafraid of animalistic copulation in the dirt. There were sometimes pillows or blankets already there from previous tenants. Sometimes, if you were lucky, an empty room could be found. I saw a mattress on the floor in a janitor’s closet.

  I had made the conscious decision to put all my efforts into the cutest girl in Qatar—one that I don’t regret—but it didn’t work out, and now it was way too late to try and find sex. What few girls there were had their pick of the litter and had long ago paired off with the Adonis of their choice. Mr. Strawberry Blond had set his sights on the same girl I had and didn’t seem willing to take no for an answer too easily. He was one of the alpha males of our rotation and probably could have scored with most any of the other girls, but he didn’t want to settle, either. I can’t blame him for trying.

  He talked to Chris for a good forty-five minutes. Afterward, she came back to where Karl and I were hanging out with Jess. Karl probably would have slept with Jess if given the chance, but she wasn’t into guys. The three of us talked about this for a while. (In Spanish, Jess confided to Karl how incredibly hot Chris was naked.) The fact that she couldn’t serve openly was ridiculous. There will be a day (hopefully soon) when the military will finally realize how embarrassing, stupid, and wrong their policy on homosexuals is.

  The four of us hung out the rest of the night. When the bar closed, we went to the coffee shop and talked while we shared pizza. The blond prick and his two shitbirds were never far away, but they eventually gave up and walked back to the barracks. I have to admit this was enormously satisfying for my ego. It was a hot night, hotter than any in Iraq (if you can believe that), but a nice way to end our time on pass.

  We flew back to Iraq the next morning. Once we got back, everyone was in the big tent again, sitting on benches, but this time we were waiting for transportation back to our various bases. The vehicle that would take Karl, Earl, Lawrence, and me showed up, and the driver told us to h
op in. Chris was sitting on the ground, leaning against the tent post. Even in uniform she was heartbreakingly beautiful. I knew I’d probably never see her again. All I could do was look at her one last time and take a mental picture. Her hair was pulled up like it was the first time I saw her—off her collar (per military standards), combed to the side, and tucked neatly behind her ears. She looked up at me, smiled, and waved. I waved and said goodbye.

  September 6, 2004

  THREE DAYS OF COMBAT

  Day One: Operation Salt Lick

  Iraq has one major highway, and from it there are two roads that run to the logistical support base in Balad. These two intersections are an obvious favorite spot for insurgent assholes to attack coalition convoys. This day’s attack was a remote-detonated car bomb. Basically a few 155mm artillery rounds were primed, connected to a cell phone as the trigger device, then placed in a car parked off to the side of the road at one of the intersections. In this kind of attack, someone will watch the intersection and when the next tasty target drives by—Boom!—mayhem ensues. This car bomb was an old Volkswagen taxi. There is a spot near this intersection that has become a small landfill due to the fact that Iraqis seem to love to dump their garbage wherever. When the taxi blew up, the landfill ignited delightfully from the explosion, filling the area with a hazy drift of smoke to make the whole scene a bit more apocalyptic. Nice touch, insurgent assholes!

  This convoy was mostly Air Force, and one of their guys took some shrapnel to the shoulder from the blast. Our medics fixed him right up and called in a medevac chopper. His wound wasn’t life-threatening, and he ended up being okay. And as per usual, this attack made a big mess of the highway and injured more innocent bystanders than coalition forces, both of which are more of an inconvenience to Iraqis than anyone else. Keep up the good work, insurgent assholes!

  Later that night…

  Our battalion commander had an idea. We would put a cargo trailer by the side of the road and kill or capture anyone who tried to steal it! Brilliant! And this goatfuck…er, genius plan needed a good name. So he chose to call it…OPERATION SALT LICK! The trailer was driven to the designated spot on the highway and left just off the side of the road as if it had been abandoned. Sometimes when huge convoys have major problems, trailers or vehicles that they cannot recover in a timely manner will be abandoned. By the time someone can be sent back to recover them, the Iraqis will have either stolen them or picked them totally clean like vultures. You almost have to forgive the little thieving bastards because they consider this completely acceptable behavior, like picking up a nickel from the sidewalk. The battalion commander and his flunkies then waited in the bushes (or whatever) for the evildoers to take the bait.

  One thing you can count on in Iraq is for Iraqis to take anything that isn’t cemented into the ground, even huge tractor trailers. Sure enough, once it got dark some people with a truck pulled over and tried to hook the trailer up. That’s when the battalion commander and his boys popped out of the shadows and nabbed the would-be thieves! Ha HA! It was at this point that my platoon, still on QRF, was called to the scene to help with security and the removal of the detainees. So far things were going brilliantly, just as the battalion commander had planned!

  But this was where it all started to go a bit sideways. First, there was some confusion about getting a truck there to tow the trailer back. Once a truck was finally sent down, it turned out to be the wrong kind of truck and would not be able to tow the trailer. Then there was some more discussion as to what kind of truck was needed and if one was available. No one could seem to figure out where the truck was that had originally dropped the trailer off. Then a brilliant sub-plan was hatched to send a truck that could tow the thieves’ truck, which in turn could tow the trailer.

  After a few hours of unbelievable nonsense and some hilarious radio traffic about the different makes of military tractor trailers, their capabilities, and their current availability to us, plus a decent helping of the battalion commander gnashing his teeth, we were finally ready to leave.

  While the battalion commander was on the radio trying to find himself a truck, we did some traffic stops. Any chance we get to pull vehicles over, we take advantage of. The more random the occasion, the better. The less predictable we are about traffic stops, the more effective of a deterrent it is for insurgents who use the highway to transport their evil wares. And you won’t believe some of the stuff we find this way. On this particular night, we found a car that had a large cardboard box completely stuffed full of stacks of Iraqi cash. The car’s occupants claimed the money had something to do with the Olympic soccer game. (Winnings perhaps?) There was nothing else incriminating in the car, and the passengers didn’t seem very scumbaggish, so it was decided to just let them and their money go. Our night was already deep into the realm of clusterfuck and no one was eager to fill out all the witness statements that this amount of cash would require.

  Yo yo yo. One good thing did come from this day. While we were medevac’ing the wounded Air Force guy, I found on the road part of the grill with the VW emblem on it from the car bomb (quite a ways from the point of detonation), which I now sport as a necklace, ghetto-fabulously.

  September 7, 2004

  THREE DAYS OF COMBAT

  Day Two: The Head

  One of the best things about taking something over is you get to change things. Like when you marry a girl, you get to change her last name, or if you buy someone’s house, you get to turn the spare bedroom into a game room. Sometimes the changes made are good, and sometimes they aren’t. Sometimes the changes take, and sometimes they don’t. When my battalion moved into forward operating base Lion, north of Baghdad, the first thing we did was change the name to FOB O’Ryan. Our unit is known as Orion, but it was decided that we would use the spelling O’Ryan, the name of the decorated officer our unit was homophonically named after. I prefer the Greek over the Irish, and this book is my fiefdom, so I am hereby changing the spelling of our base to FOB Orion. Isn’t arbitrarily wielding power fun?

  FOB Orion needed a lot of work and most of the physical changes we made in the time we were there were pretty good. For example, plywood shitters with poop barrels that needed their contents burned regularly were replaced with a port-o-john-type service. Sometimes the Iraqis who ran the port-o-john service and their families would be killed by insurgents, and it would take several days before replacement workers could be found, so we’d have to go back to shitting in burn barrels temporarily, but regardless, the port-o-johns were an excellent change, a definite improvement. Another improvement was the gym that KBR, a subsidiary of Halliburton, built for us. They took an old ammo bunker, cleaned and painted the interior, installed air conditioning, put down a sectional rubber-mat floor, then brought in some exercise machines and free weights. It wasn’t fantastic but it was pretty damn decent. And it only took them six months and eighty thousand dollars to build. I am not exaggerating when I say that my platoon could have done the job in two days, five at the most, absolutely free of charge. After all, it was the soldiers who wanted the gym, not the overfed, beer-bellied KBR guys. But, hey, who am I to say how American tax dollars should be spent? Thank god for combat zone tax exclusion, because if I were paying taxes I would be pissed. Speaking of which, have I ever mentioned the KBR truck drivers I talked to who said they didn’t know of one single driver who didn’t fudge the hours they reported having driven each month? I love how the truck drivers would confide things like this to soldiers.

  The most vital changes to FOB Orion were those that involved security. When we first came to our FOB, a smallish but somewhat sprawling collection of concrete and earth bunkers, there were a handful of insurgents who were living in and operating out of one of the remote bunkers. Concertina wire and berms were put up around the entire perimeter of the base, and the unexploded ordnance that littered the place (a draw for insurgents because this is what they use to make their improvised explosive devices) was cleared.

  After the b
asic level of perimeter security was improved, there were ongoing changes to base security, most really good and some a little more superfluous. The buildings that housed our tactical operations center (TOC) and the administrative and logistics office were strong, but not what one would consider “hardened.” Tall concrete barriers were eventually put up around these buildings, a definite improvement. In an effort to further protect these buildings, a massive berm was installed in a location between the front gate and the TOC. I don’t know the exact reasoning behind the installation of this monstrosity of earth we dubbed “Hunter Mountain,” a name in honor of the battalion moniker of “The Hunter,” the professional title of the legendary Orion, but it just seemed a little excessive. If the insurgents had tanks, they would not have been able to directly attack the TOC because of Hunter Mountain. In that sense, it was a successful improvement. But the insurgents don’t have tanks, so it was just a big dumb pile of dirt with a wall of dirt-filled barriers across the top like the Great Wall of China.

  Another security-related aspect of our base that was constantly being improved upon was our front gate area. There were barriers forming entrance and exit lanes for both civilian and military traffic. There was a parking lot and a vehicle search area. There was a machine gun bunker that overlooked it all but that had nearly useless fields of fire. No one could seem to come up with a solution for the area that was truly effective, but there were certainly plenty of attempts to do so.

  The most recent improvement was to completely change the entrance and exit for military traffic. Long, serpentine Jersey barriers were installed, with the entrance and exit lanes located in the almost exact opposite places as they were before. In my humble opinion, the change was stupid and unnecessary, but again, not my call. It was dumb to start with, then changed to dumb-but-different.