Just Another Soldier

by Jason Christopher Hartley

  A few vehicles had gone down the highway over the last minute, but they all seemed to be eighteen-wheelers. We saw another set of headlights coming down the highway toward us. There was no other traffic. I couldn’t make out what kind of vehicle it was yet, so I yelled back, “Is this the van?! Is this the van?!” I knew there was a chance that the vehicle had already passed us. Everyone was up to the canal now, and we stood there watching the approaching headlights. I went down on one knee. As the lights got closer it became clear that the vehicle was something that looked like a Volkswagen bus. It was nearly in front of us, and I yelled again, “Is this it?!” All our weapons were aimed at the vehicle, and through my NVGs I could see all our lasers on the van. No one moved or said a word. Half a second passed. Then Jeff shouted, “FIRE!”

  I began squeezing the trigger of my rifle as quickly as I could. After the first few rounds I fired, my NVGs inexplicably shut off. I continued to fire, aiming now by watching my tracers as the steady stream of our bullets pelted the speeding van and the road around it. I expended my entire thirty-round magazine at the van as it flew by. It was nearly out of sight now and Jeff was yelling to cease fire. Frustrated that the van was getting away, I removed the safety on my 203, used the Force to guesstimate an angle of trajectory, and—Doonk!—fired a grenade, a total Hail Mary. My forty millimeters of high-explosive love disappeared over the treetops that lined the road. It was completely quiet, now that everyone had stopped shooting. That wonderful smell of just-spent rounds hung in the air. My heart was pounding, and I felt an exhilaration like none I had ever felt. I thought to myself, Oh my god, I could do this every day! Then I immediately started to second-guess my decision to fire a grenade, and my moment of ecstasy began to pass. This was the first time I had fired a live grenade in combat. I wasn’t sure if I was even allowed to shoot a grenade in a case like this. Fuck, I hope there weren’t any houses on the other side of the road. There was no explosion yet. The round seemed to sail through the air forever. Maybe it won’t explode. Maybe it was a dud. Maybe no one even noticed I’d fired it. There was still no explosion. Then, BOOM! Shit, that was really loud. I didn’t remember grenades being that loud. Well, maybe in all the confusion no will notice or remember the explosion.

  “Oh my god, dude, that was almost the coolest thing I’ve ever seen!” Sean said excitedly. “Your grenade only missed hitting the back of the van by four feet at the most! If you had hit it, that would’ve been worth an extra life! That’s like getting a green mushroom!” Sean’s Super Mario Brothers analogy was making me feel better about the grenade when Jeff came up to me and said, “Congratulations, you’ve just become a permanent member of the strike team,” then he laughed, half maniacally. So I guess the grenade was okay after all.

  A minute later, the Humvees sped past us down the highway. It didn’t take them long to catch up to the van. The man driving the van had pulled into the driveway of a house just off the highway and went inside looking for help. One of the bullets had hit him in the lower back, barely missing his spine, and there were a few wounds to his legs, either from bullets or bullet fragments. Matt was with the Humvees that night, and began giving the man aid for his wounds while they waited for CASEVAC to arrive. How the people in the house were involved, or if they knew this man at all was unclear, but it was decided they would all be brought in just to be sure.

  While the situation with the people and the wounded driver was being handled, the van was inspected. Much to everyone’s astonishment, the entire cargo area was found to be stacked from floor to ceiling with crates of baby chickens. No explosives or any IED-related materials were found.

  Back at the canal, our team and the other ambush teams met at the extraction point, where we waited for the Humvees to pick us up. Those guys had their hands full at the moment, so it gave the rest of us a chance to talk. We should have continued to be tactical, sitting silently behind cover and concealment while we waited to be extracted, but given all that had just happened, noise discipline went out the window. Our biggest concern was being shot at by passing convoys, who would not be expecting to see friendly troops off the highway in the bushes, so we all sat in a depressed area near the canal, which provided us with cover from the road.

  I sat down next to Ray, who had been part of the team that fired the shots intended to disable the vehicle. He was complaining about how he thought it was stupid to try to disable a vehicle with 5.56mm rounds. We discussed the series of events from the time he shot at the van to the time my team shot at the van. He said, “Yo, when I heard that 203 go off, my dick got hard.”

  One of the unfortunate things about being an infantryman, and therefore at the bottom of the information totem pole, is it’s not always easy to follow up on events to learn of their outcome. It was a few days before we learned the story behind the chicken van and what the man driving it was doing that night. From our perspective, all we saw was a man stopped at the side of the highway in the middle of the night in an area notorious for IEDs and messing around with something that looked like artillery shells. Apparently the man driving the van needed to transport the baby chickens but couldn’t do it during the day because the cargo area of the van would have gotten too hot. The average temperature during the day is over 120 degrees, and prolonged exposure to that kind of heat would have killed the chicks during a long drive. So he thought he’d transport them at night, while it was cool. But his van was a piece of shit, and partway into his trip he noticed that the engine was starting to overheat. Since the highway is littered with empty water bottles discarded by soldiers in convoys, he thought he could drive until he found a discarded bottle that still had some water in it. When he pulled over, he took a box out of the van, perhaps a place to put water bottles, then started picking up and putting down bottles on the side of the road. A lot of the bottles used by soldiers have a shape almost identical to artillery rounds. So when Ray’s team watched this man through their infrared scopes, what he was holding looked to them like artillery shells.

  There are some who were never convinced of the man’s innocence. If it were an elaborate ploy—the story of the chickens and the overheating engine—an excuse to stop a vehicle on the highway during the wee hours of the night in prime-IED territory, it would have worked very well.

  Once I’d learned the man we shot at was most likely just an innocent guy with really bad luck, I am a little embarrassed to say it did not diminish for me the excitement I felt. I will forever be relieved and happy he didn’t die and that most of the chickens survived the van’s aeration, but I have to admit that a part of me still wishes that grenade had hit the van.

  The van was towed back to our base, and the man driving it went into surgery. The bullet that struck him had gone through the van, through the back of his seat, then into his back, and was lodged in his gut. The surgery to remove the bullet was a success, and the man recovered very well. His van was held at our base (for several days in sweltering heat) until someone came to pick it up. All the chickens died.

  September 10, 2004

  BY FAR THE MOST BREATHTAKINGLY STUPID AND EMBARRASSING THING I’VE EVER DONE IN MY ENTIRE MILITARY CAREER

  One day while I was with the QRF, lounging around in one of the four-man huts in our staging area, we got a call that farmers had found some mortar rounds and wanted to turn them in. This was not an unusual call. Locals often report unexploded ordnance because they want a reward for finding it. It wasn’t an urgent call, but we quickly mounted our vehicles and headed toward the front gate of our base.

  Before leaving on a mission, each soldier will have a ritual he goes through to be sure he has everything he needs. We’ve been on so many missions now, the method I’ve developed is I will subconsciously check to see if anything feels different. For example, when working with the QRF, my chemical suit and assault pack with extra ammunition would already be loaded into the Humvee. Then, when a call came, I’d don my body armor, strap on my vest that had all my ammunition on it, put my helmet on, gr
ab my CamelBak and weapon, and get into the Humvee. In my mind I wouldn’t consciously be thinking, “I need to put my armor on.” I would just know that there was a certain feeling that putting on my armor gave me. Specifically, I was looking for the weight of the gear on my body. Once in the vehicle, my hands were always occupied because they would be holding my rifle. The way I know I have my weapon is by the feeling of having my hands occupied.

  When we got the call, I was in the middle of cleaning my sunglasses. I have 20/40 vision, which is what I like to call the Vision of Optimists, because at a distance, everyone is good looking. I don’t particularly care for wearing glasses because I hate having anything on my face. I’ve always been able to pass my rifle qualification without glasses, but I usually do this by using the Force. Three-hundred-meter targets are virtually impossible to see when you have the Vision of Optimists, but if you memorize where the target is and have someone call it out when it appears, or if you can see the sun glint off the target as it pops up, you can sometimes hit it. I can hit targets at two-and three hundred meters without glasses, but there’s no way I can positively identify targets at that range. There are never innocent or friendly targets on a normal rifle range, only targets you’re supposed to shoot. Real life, obviously, isn’t the same. Accidentally killing the wrong person is a big fear of mine, so I didn’t mess around and made sure to get both regular glasses and prescription sunglasses for this deployment, which meant that something I did on a daily basis was clean my glasses. The moment we got this call, I was in the middle of giving them a good cleaning, so I continued to do so while we rolled up to the gate.

  Before leaving the base, the leader of the QRF would check in with the Tactical Operations Center to let them know we were about to leave. This process usually took only a few minutes, then we would be sent on our way. I finished cleaning my sunglasses and put them on my face just as we started to leave the TOC. Now my hands were unoccupied. Why are my hands empty? Why aren’t they occupied? Why isn’t my weapon in my hands? Holy Jesus god! Where is my weapon?

  My eyes scanned the interior of the Humvee frantically. I knew that if my weapon wasn’t in my hands, it probably wasn’t in the Humvee at all. I didn’t see it and didn’t waste time looking for it—an M4/M203 is not something that can drop out of sight between the seats like a pen or a coin. I had to accept the fact that I had left it hanging on the hook on the wall of my hut at the staging area.

  We hadn’t left the base yet, and there was still time for me to get it. The staging area was less than one minute away. We could drive to the hut and drive back to the gate in two minutes, tops. But there would be no way around explaining to the rest of the QRF why my truck had to drive back to the huts.

  In the Army, and especially in combat arms units, your reputation is the most important thing you have. It is how you are judged by the other soldiers in your unit. Anytime anyone does something stupid, word spreads instantly. What usually happens is one or a few guys will interpret and assess the event, share this interpretation, and then an opinion is spread along with the story. The same process takes place anytime someone does something noteworthy as well. This is, for the most part, how a soldier’s reputation is generated and propagated.

  Even if I attempted to make up a convincing cover story for going back to the huts, there was no getting past the fact that I had forgotten something really important. If we went back, I saw no way to hide the fact that I had forgotten my weapon. My mind raced. Then I noticed that there were two spare SAWs in the Humvee.

  My position in my Humvee was usually in the passenger seat, where I would man the radio. This position is called the “truck commander,” or TC. The term TC is borrowed from tankers; in a tank, the guy in charge is called the TC for “tank commander.” On this day I wasn’t the TC; I was in the seat behind the driver. Orlando was driving and had his SAW next to him. In the turret on the machine gun was Cesar, with his SAW lying at his feet next to me, along with his ammo vest.

  I didn’t want to humiliate myself by letting anyone know I had left my weapon in my hut; the only truly important thing was that once we got outside the base, I had a weapon. I assumed no one would think it even remotely possible to forget your weapon, so I decided that if we had to get out of the vehicles, I would just put Cesar’s ammo vest on and carry his SAW, since the only reason he’d have to leave his position in the turret would be if the Humvee were destroyed, since the machine gun he currently manned was the most important weapon we had. Besides, it wasn’t completely uncommon for us to use one another’s weapons in certain situations, so I knew I could get away with it.

  When we first came to Iraq, standard procedure for us was to keep the windows rolled down, with the barrels of our weapons pointed out of them. Once we finally realized the chances of our engaging an enemy out the window of a Humvee was zero, and something blowing up next to the Humvee only a matter of time, we changed our procedure and kept the armored windows up at all times. Since I didn’t have to put the barrel of any weapon out the window, there was an even better chance of my being able to pull this off without humiliating myself. Since everyone would be occupied with scanning their sector, I knew I had a reasonable chance of making it out of the woods.

  The drive to the farmers and their mortar rounds was a bit of a trip, so it was decided that along the way we’d check in on some areas that tended to have a fair amount of enemy activity. While we drove, I had some time to reflect. Granted, I was the only one aware at the time of the breathtakingly stupid thing I had done, but, frankly, my opinion of myself was the only one that really mattered in the long run. I tried to remember the last time I had felt this embarrassed and stupid. The first thing that came to mind was when I was fourteen and sang “Orange Crush” by R.E.M. with the “band” my friends and I had at a “Battle of the Bands” contest at a local skating rink in Utah. I was horrifically off-key and forgot some of the lyrics. A girl I had a life-altering intense crush on was in the audience, as were my parents. That was really embarrassing. I think the worst part of that was the endless amount of internal embarrassment I put myself through every time I thought about it. It took years of maturing and innumerable recountings of the story before I ever really got over it. I thought about an incident where I accidentally farted during a math class in tenth grade. It was so loud the teacher stopped teaching just to say, “Wow. That was loud!” I was sitting next to two of the cutest girls in the school when that happened, of course. The worst part about doing something embarrassing and stupid is the effect it has on your reputation or “coolness.” When you’re a teenager, although your reputation is of little consequence in the grand scheme of things, it seems like the end of the world when it takes a serious hit. One of the worst hits my self-image took was when I met my biological father for the second time. I’ve always had father issues, since I never got along very well with Jim, my adoptive father in Salt Lake, so when I finally met George, my biological father, it was important to me on a deeply meaningful psychological level to impress him. This went straight to hell when I met him for the second time at the age of twenty-one. My sister, Dayna, had just gotten her associate’s degree from the university she and I attended, and George had flown to Utah to celebrate with us. After dinner, we were going to see the premiere of Batman Forever at a local theater. Dinner wasn’t agreeing with me, and in a moment of desperation, when I couldn’t find a bathroom in the mall where the theater was, I shat on the floor in a remote area, where all the shops were closed. As luck would have it, when the long line for the movie was formed, it snaked around and went right down the hall where I had left my Jackson Pollock masterpiece. God, it’s all so Freudian. The anal stage of psychosexual development is, what, the second stage? The child derives satisfaction from the ability to control his own bowel movements. The whole father thing was explained by Jung, but I simply don’t recall how it all works. Now, here I was in combat, and my life and the lives of the guys I was with depended on my ability to make the men I worke
d with and was in charge of feel safe and in good hands. How could I ask anyone to have confidence in me when I couldn’t even have the confidence in myself to remember my fucking rifle?

  Now the QRF team was in a sprawling area of gravel pits, where the terrain was cut deeply by roads, ravines, and streams. We briefly dismounted, so I put Cesar’s ammo vest on and grabbed his SAW. A few guys noticed my change in weapon, but they assumed I was just being hooah carrying a heavier weapon for a bit.

  We got back into the Humvees and drove out to where the farmers were. Sure enough, there were a few tank rounds. The explosive ordnance disposal guys did their thing and loaded the rounds into their truck. Once again we dismounted, me with Cesar’s SAW, and spent some time looking around the area. This time most everyone noticed my new weapon and had a comment for me about it. “Yeah, I thought I’d check it out,” I told them. They all bought it.

  Most all our SAW gunners, at one time or another, complained about the weight of their weapon. Cesar had his vest rigged so there were two two-hundred-round drums in the front pockets and a two-hundred-round drum in each side pocket. With a hundred-round pouch on the weapon itself, I was carrying seven hundred rounds, a typical load for a SAW gunner. With most the weight of the rounds in the front, and with the additional weight of the SAW itself hanging down in front of me from its sling, I quickly realized that this setup was in fact incredibly fucking uncomfortable. I felt like a pregnant woman. I could either never be a SAW gunner or I’d have to figure out a different way to carry all the ammunition.