“Wait, that’s not smart,” I said. “It’s a full moon out, he doesn’t need a flashlight. That will only make him stand out even more. Abdullah, don’t take the flashlight.”
But the man was shaking his head. “If you are stopped by the Americans, tell them you are looking for a cow. You need to not look suspicious. A flashlight will make you look less suspicious,” he told Abdullah. I still thought it was stupid, but Abdullah took the flashlight without argument and began walking toward the highway without saying a word.
“Be careful,” I told him. “Just go far enough to see the highway, then come right back.” He looked back at me and smiled.
I was tense and I think my uncle could sense this. He offered the men cigarettes. While the three of them smoked, my uncle made small talk. I had a bad feeling. I was starting to regret having gotten involved. I was thinking how I should never have let it get this far and how I should never have let Abdullah fall into these counterproductive ways of thinking. My uncle continued to talk, but I wasn’t listening. In the direction Abdullah was walking, a dog began to bark. One of the men was laughing now. My uncle was good at putting people at ease. I tried to smile.
Suddenly a deafening amount of machine gun fire erupted extremely close to us in the direction of the barking dog. I saw the bright flashes of the guns then found myself facedown on the ground with the wind knocked out of me. I was never more confused or terrified in my life. I stood up and began to run in the opposite direction. I heard the AK-47 shooting. I ran for a few minutes. I remember nothing else.
When I woke up, I was in a hospital in Baqubah. Barak was next to my bed. He explained that I had been shot in the chest and brought in by two men who were friends of Abdullah’s. He said I had given them his name and address. He told me it was important that I stay with him in Baqubah for a few months. I asked him where Abdullah was. He told me he didn’t know.
I returned home after two months. My uncle hadn’t fled, and when the Americans who shot at us searched our house, they took him and Essam away. Essam was later released, but my uncle had been sent to the Abu Ghraib prison. The Americans claimed they had proof he’d made the bomb.
Abdullah had disappeared after the shooting. It was assumed he was safe and staying with friends, as I was, but two months later his body was found in an abandoned shack a few miles from our house. He had a bullet wound in his head. The day his body was found, Zia hanged herself from the roof of her house. The two were buried on the same day.
Jason
The rest of this story is true, from the me-sided point of view.
We had another ambush planned, and I was excited. We were getting more adept at the planning and execution of ambushes. Jeff would usually choose the spot where we’d be dropped, find a good location that overlooked a few roads and intersections, then plan a primary and secondary location for the pickup. For months we’d been performing operations that mostly involved being in the Humvees. This wasn’t bad work, but it wasn’t what we had been trained to do. We were all light infantry and we were most comfortable being on foot, moving across the terrain, looking for a fight. Since the ambushes allowed a short movement, we were finally being afforded the chance to do this. Additionally, we were operating in small teams, usually with five men, which made movement easy to coordinate and made us extremely mobile. After the incident with the chicken truck, we were eager for more action but wanted more than anything to engage actual enemy. I had fired my weapon only twice now, both times at people who were quite arguably not combatants. Regardless of whether or not we ever were to directly engage any true enemy combatants, it felt good to be performing light infantry tasks.
The team I was always a part of was run by Jeff. He liked to refer to the team as the “strike team,” apparently from watching too many episodes of The Shield. The strike team consisted of Jeff, me, Rich, Jimmy, and Sean. Jimmy and Sean both carried SAWs, and I carried the M203. Because of my ability to fire grenades, I was always given the job of rear security, the logic being that I could shoot over the heads of the guys in front of me if the need arose.
Normally, Sean would be a part of the strike team, but since he was one of the few guys in the platoon who was qualified to man the.50-caliber machine gun and since the guy who would normally have been in the turret of the Humvee where it was mounted was on leave, Sean had to stay with the .50-cal and wasn’t able to be with us for this ambush. For this mission our lieutenant replaced him.
The evening started the way it always did when we performed ambushes. The Humvees drove us down a dirt road, not far from the highway, we got off and laid low, then they drove away to their staging area, several kilometers away. We were getting good at the infil/exfil parts of these missions, now only taking a few seconds to be dropped off and less than a minute to be picked up.
Once the Humvees were out of sight, we picked up and started the movement to the ambush site. This time we were not going to be crossing any canals. I think it had finally sunk in that crossing canals was way too much of a hassle and a security risk. This movement was also going to be across mostly open fields, no vineyards or orchards—another improvement. The only comfort in moving through the vineyards was that it necessitated our staying close to one another. When you are in the dark, there is a natural tendency to want to be close to the guys you’re with. Now that we were moving across open fields, I had to resist the impulse to follow too closely behind the guy in front of me. Since I was in trail, it sometimes got a little disconcerting when I couldn’t see Jeff, who was always on point.
The phases of the moon become something very important when you are an infantryman. For this ambush we had a lot of visibility because of a nearly full moon. But it also meant the enemy would have more visibility, too. Given the environment (open fields, minimal foliage, few houses) and the time of night (zero-dark-thirty), there was little reason for anyone to be out unless their intent was questionable.
There was a lot of radio traffic. There were engagements at other locations in our AO, but not near us. This put everyone on top of his game for the night. We knew the bad guys were out.
As we crept through the field, I saw a bright streak stream across the sky. Through my night-vision goggles it looked like a rocket, a large tail of continuous flame. I hadn’t heard a pop or an explosion from a rocket’s being fired, and as it flew overhead it made no sound. My heart started to pound. I said, “What’s that?!” but no one responded. At first I thought maybe it was a flare, then maybe a mortar. But I knew mortars weren’t self-propelled, so that wouldn’t explain the tail. It must be an RPG. I waited for the impact and the explosion, but it never came. I flipped my NVGs up and looked up at the sky and then toward the horizon in the direction of fire. I saw nothing, whatever it was seemed to have just disappeared. I was baffled. I asked again, “Did anyone see that? A flare or something, overhead.” I got puzzled looks and head shakes. I didn’t get it. Then it hit me. It was a shooting star. The streak would have made very little visible light, but through the NVGs, with the tail and all the infrared light it must have been emitting, it looked huge. No one else had seen it; I just happened to have been looking up at the time it was above us. This made me relax a little, but I was still on edge.
In the distance, there were a few homes and a couple of clusters of trees. A lot of these homes had flickering lights coming from them, probably small fires used for illumination. The light was barely visible to the naked eye, but was easily visible through our NVGs. Sometimes when people would walk by the flames, a shadow would block the light cast on the nearby clusters of trees. Most of the homes were several kilometers away from us, but the shadows made it clear that there were people still awake.
The movement was basically flawless. We got to our ambush site in a minimal amount of time without any major setbacks or obstacles. We immediately settled into our normal positions: two men were located where they could overwatch the road we were next to in one direction; two others watched the other direction; a
nd I kept an eye on the field behind us. I had brought along a helmet-mounted infrared viewer that our company had purchased for the sniper section. None of the snipers like it, so I have had possession of it for a few weeks now. I always take it with me on ambushes, and alternate between scanning the field with my NVGs and scanning with the infrared viewer, keeping it detached and using it the same way you would use binoculars. The military has been trying to develop a system that integrates IR capabilities with the NVGs. I hope I am still in the infantry when this device is released because it would be really cool to be able to use both types of systems simultaneously.
The overall sense of imminent danger slowly waned as we sat in our ambush site. Whatever conflicts were going on in our AO seemed to be resolving themselves, and all was quiet where we were. It was another pleasant night for an ambush: comfortably cool, with a slight breeze. I knew I had to enjoy this while it lasted. In the coming weeks the temperature would dip down into the range where sitting in ambush positions would require cold-weather gear. This meant either wearing more layers or bringing along an extra jacket or blanket.
As with all the ambushes we had performed, we sat in our positions for several hours without event. I knew it was highly unlikely that we would make contact with the enemy, and I had given up on the notion a long time ago. At the very least this was good exercise and good training. We were getting better at navigating at night, at moving tactically despite the weight of our gear, and we were all becoming intimately familiar with these areas along the highway that were favorites of the enemy for IEDs.
It was nearing our exfil time, and we prepared to move back to the site where we had been dropped off. As we were preparing to move, we were informed that there was a suspected IED on the highway, near the intersection the Humvees would need to use to get to the extraction point. With a suspected IED being reported, I hoped we might stay a bit longer on the ambush, but it had come to our planned time of departure, and it was decided that we weren’t going to deviate from the plan.
The movement to the extraction point was going to be fairly quick, but on the way out, Jeff found some trails that followed a canal that were low enough that we had cover and concealment in almost all directions. To stay out of sight and to have the ability to be mobile and move quickly was more important than following typical infantry doctrine, which would have kept us on our original path. This is just one of many things we had been slowly learning; it was too bad that we didn’t learn them sooner, because I believe we could have been more productive in the time we had spent thus far in Iraq. (By productive, I mean we could have found and killed more bad guys.)
The trail we were on met with the dirt road on which we were to be picked up. The intersection where the trail met the road would have left us too exposed, so we sat just far enough down the trail so that we had a lot of protection but could still be easily seen and picked up by the Humvees.
On the road, a dog began barking incessantly. This could compromise our security, but there was nothing we could do. To shoot it would announce our presence to anyone within miles. But its barking also made it obvious to anyone listening that there was someone nearby. A few of the guys shined the IR lasers from their weapons into the dog’s eyes. There are two settings in the PEQ-2 lasers we had mounted on our weapons: low and high. Low is essentially used for training, and high is used for combat. The lasers are incredibly powerful. The distance they are visible at night is remarkable. The PEQ-2s also have a floodlight that is unbelievably powerful. It is invisible to the naked eye, but blazingly bright when viewed through NVGs. The high setting is physically disabled during training, because the danger of blindness to soldiers is too great. Knowing this, there have been many occasions where soldiers have shined the lasers into the eyes of animals at night. I can’t say I like it when guys do this, but I’m not going to be the one to tell them to stop. This perhaps is a failing of mine: I am not prone to stopping guys from being cruel. I’d like to think I’d prevent any crimes against humanity, but I can’t get excited at the thought of being tagged a member of PETA for asking the guys to not blind any dogs.
The lasers didn’t seem to have any effect on the dog, or at least it didn’t make it stop barking. We gave up on getting the dog to go away and continued to wait. Because of the suspected IED, we knew there would be a delay in the Humvees’ getting to our location.
While we waited, I noticed a faint light coming from the direction of the highway. It was moving—bobbing, actually. I wasn’t sure what it could be; it was probably two hundred meters away or more. The more I watched it, the more it seemed to be someone carrying a flashlight. We knew there was a suspected IED in that direction, and to see someone with a flashlight coming from the same direction was definitely worth paying attention to. I tried to get the attention of Rich, who was nearest to me, but he and the other guys had started to move closer to the road. I wasn’t sure why they were moving; we were already in a pretty good spot. I also didn’t want to lose track of the guy with the flashlight. The dog was still barking, and it was pissing me off that I had no way of getting it to shut up. I wished that I had a crossbow or a silencer. The dog was about seventy-five meters away. The man with the flashlight seemed to be on the same road we were on, and he would be near us soon. I got up and moved with the rest of the guys, being sure to keep at least one of them in sight.
We crept up the trail a short distance more, until we were on the road. I was a good distance from the other four guys, but they were well within sight. I kept my eye on the bobbing flashlight. Then, without any warning, all four of the other guys started shooting. I was completely at a loss. I had no idea what the hell they were shooting at. My first reaction was to think that they were performing a recon by fire—that is, shooting in the direction of a suspected enemy to see what happened, to see if he ran, shot back, shouted, whatever. It can be an effective thing so long as you aren’t afraid to give up your own position in the process.
My thought process in trying to determine why they were shooting lasted for only a split second. All I knew was that we were shooting now, and there was no reason not to kill the dog. I put the bright green dot of my laser on its chest, moved the selector lever on my rifle to fire, and squeezed the trigger. POP! I had hit it, but it was still alive and yapping, so I just kept shooting it. POP! POP! POP! POP! It had started chasing its own ass, trying to figure out, I supposed, what was biting it. I couldn’t believe it hadn’t died yet. POP! The last round went through its chest, and it dropped to the ground. I had rapidly fired six rounds, four of which had hit it. It broke my heart to do it, but I had to stop the barking. The dog went down hard. I was proud of it.
“Get the 203 up here!” Jeff yelled back to me. I ran up to the four who were online together across the road. I took a knee and fired a few rounds in the same direction they were firing. I still had no idea what we were shooting at.
I yelled, “Give me a distance and direction!”
The lieutenant yelled back to me, “Twelve o’clock, seventy-five meters! By that gate!”
“Roger!” I had a round of HEDP in the tube. I removed the safety from the 203. Because of all the dust and smoke, our lasers were highly visible now. I pointed my rifle so that the laser was parallel to the ground and aiming at the chain link gate, then raised the angle slightly. I squeezed the trigger of the 203. Doonk! BOOM! The round detonated shortly after being fired.
Jeff yelled, “Keep firing!”
“Roger!” I yelled back. Shit, that’s all you had to say. I opened the breech of the 203, and the smoking casing from the fired round fell to the ground. While I was loading the next round, I asked what we were shooting at. I think it was Rich who said, “There’s a guy with a fucking RPG! He was by the gate with a bunch of other guys!” Jesus. I loaded the round, then aimed, this time a bit farther, aiming the laser a bit higher. Doonk! A slight pause. BOOM! About 150 meters away this time. I opened the 203, and the spent casing clattered to the ground. I loaded another. When
firing indirect weapons like mortars, we’re taught to “bracket” the enemy, firing far then near, far then near, or left to right, left to right. I was thinking I should do essentially the same with the 203, to at least try to fire in as many different spots as possible in the same general vicinity as the first. Doonk! Pause. BOOM! This one about a hundred meters. The spent casing falls; I load another. This time I thought I’d try to bring it in a bit closer, maybe fifty to seventy-five meters. I put the laser right on the gate this time. DoonkBOOM! There was virtually no pause from the time I fired to the time it detonated. It hit the road in front of us no at more than twenty-five or thirty meters. The minimum distance a 40mm grenade can be fired where the arming mechanism allows the round to detonate is supposed to be thirty-five meters, but that was thirty-five meters at the absolute most. They say that in heated situations like this there’s a phenomenon that takes place called “auditory exclusion,” where your ears sort of shut off a bit and you don’t hear how loud things are. The two times I had fired my weapon I didn’t have earplugs in, and my memory of the firing was nothing more than a popping sound when I shot, not the incredibly loud Crack! that there normally is. The first three 40mm rounds I had fired didn’t seem loud—just a muffled boom and a bright flash of light. This fourth round, however, was noticeably loud. Really loud. Jimmy must have thought the same thing, because he shouted, “Too close!”
I started loading another round in the 203. I yelled, “Do you want me to keep shooting, or are we going to maneuver?” Once I got the round in the tube and was ready to fire, Jeff said, “Hold your fire. We’re gonna throw frags, then we’ll maneuver.” Frags? I thought. No need for frags, these guys are either dead or long gone. And if they were on the run, I wanted to get moving. Whatever. While Jeff and the lieutenant got their hand grenades ready, I got down behind the shoulder of the road. Frags make me nervous. If you fuck up and drop them or don’t throw them far enough, you’re gonna be in a world of hurt. Plus, they send shrapnel in all directions at once. You better have some pretty good cover when one goes off. I got as low as I possibly could. I could see Jeff and the lieutenant standing on the road. Jeff yelled, “Frag out!” and they both threw in unison, then got down off to the side of the road just ahead of us. BA-BOOM! Both frags exploded at almost the same time. I looked up and saw that the cloud of dust from the grenade the lieutenant had thrown was close. Then I heard him yell, “I’M DOWN!” Oh god. This is why I hate frags. The grenade must have gone off right next to him. Rich and I ran over to where he was. I didn’t need to see his injury to know that we would need an immediate medevac. I looked at Rich, who had the radio, and I said, “Call a nine line, NOW!” (A nine line is the report you call in when you have casualties.) Rich looked stunned, but started the call. Then I heard the lieutenant’s voice again. “I’m good, I’ll be okay. Don’t call the nine line.” When I got to where he was, I saw that he was up to his head in water, and Jeff was in the process of taking his own gear off to try and help him out. There was a canal that ran under the road, totally invisible to us. It was heavily overgrown around the sides with rushes. The canal wasn’t very wide, but seemed to be at least eight or ten feet deep. When the lieutenant had thrown his grenade, he jumped down to a spot by the side of the road for cover, but instead slipped into the canal. He went in over his head. The current of the canal had taken him under to where the water flowed under the road, so when he came up for air his helmet hit cement and he wasn’t able to get a breath. He then pushed himself off—from what I’m not sure—back against the current and out from underneath the road. Once he was able to breathe again, most likely in a slight state of panic, he yelled that he was down. Our lieutenant is a pretty athletic guy and he was doing what I thought was impossible, which was treading water with all his armor and gear on.
Just Another Soldier Page 24