Kaboom

by Matthew Gallagher

“Definitely? How definitely?”

  “As in 100 percent, no doubt, we’re-taking-him-off-the-brigade-HVTLTHIS-VERY-MOMENT 100 percent.”

  “Uhh . . . cool.”

  Being found with one of the brigade’s top targets provided enough to bring in the other two Iraqis as well, so we began drawing up the detention paperwork, and the medics conducted a physical on all three men. About an hour later, as Lieutenant Mongo’s platoon prepared to depart the JSS with the detainees in tow, we received another phone call in the company TOC. Captain Frowny-Face answered it, and in the span of thirty seconds, I watched his face turn red, then purple, then finally white. After saying nothing more than “roger” five or six times, he hung up the phone.

  “It’s not him. They are now 200 percent certain that man is not Abbas the Beard.”

  A few isolated groans could be heard in the room, but most of us just sat there in resigned silence.

  “How . . . do things like this even happen?” Lieutenant Rant asked.

  “Have Lieutenant Mongo drive them back home instead of to Taji,” Captain Frowny-Face said. “Let’s not talk anymore about this until tomorrow.”

  As I walked out of the TOC and past the common area, intent on screaming away my frustrations in a dark, isolated corner of the JSS, I saw Lieutenant Mongo’s soldiers take off the blindfolds and cut the binds of the three almost-detainees. After Lieutenant Rant and Eddie explained the mix-up to the men, they began walking outside to the Strykers, clearly eager to go home. A soldier smiled and sarcastically wished them a happy Halloween. One of the men found with the Abbas look-alike started to hum on his way out the door. It took me a few seconds to recognize the tune he hummed as the Sportscenter jingle.

  “Good Christ,” I said out loud to myself, now standing alone in an empty room. “The world can be a really fucking sick place sometimes.”

  THE AMERICAN ELECTION

  As President-elect Barack Obama strode to the podium in Chicago to give his election day victory speech, four soldiers and I watched on television from JSS Istalquaal’s common area with the light initiates of dawn piercing the glass of the small window in the corner. One of the soldiers, a young black NCO who sat on the couch in front of me, spoke for all of us and to no one in particular at the same time. “Holy shit,” he said. “I can’t believe this is actually happening.”

  When the outcome of the election had become clear a few hours earlier, most of the politically inclined on our JSS called it a night, but a few diehards and I stayed up to watch the victory speech in Grant Park. Such a choice had little to do with my own politics and more to do with the knowledge that history had been made, and since I couldn’t participate in it, witnessing it would suffice. Further, we all understood the potency of this moment, as it directly related to our professions as military men: The so-called forever wars we fought in would now actually have an ending.

  Civilians often asked about the military vote and what the military as a whole sought from American politics. In my experience, soldiers’ politics varied almost as much as those of the greater populace. To begin with, even in the best-educated military in the history of the world, a sizable percentage simply didn’t give a damn. They came to Iraq to kill people, or for the money, or for the health-care benefits. The political happenstance of their station in life seemed superfluous to the pragmatic needs of the now.

  Obviously, the army was no bastion of liberal ideology. A majority of the politically engaged Joes, NCOs, and officers were conservative by nature, if not necessarily Republican in practice—numbers backed up by a Military Times poll conducted in the lead-up to the election, which saw 68 percent of those polled voting for Senator John McCain, while 23 percent pledged their support for then-senator Obama. Much of this derived from a variety of socioeconomic reasons, not to mention the military’s inherent nature and traditional appeal. However, after five years of war in Iraq and seven years of war in Afghanistan, some soldiers were just as tired of the status quo as the larger population. Such a sentiment, be it spoken or not, was certainly not an indictment of Senator McCain, as he justly received universal respect from the military community for his own service and sacrifices. Beyond that, the military had a long and proud tradition of stoically and silently following and respecting its presidents as the commander in chief, whoever they were and whatever their politics. Such was an absolute necessity in a free society and the bedrock of the American republic. But as private citizens, it seemed, more and more soldiers—particularly junior officers, including myself—yearned for something new and different. The outcome of this election would directly impact our futures, not to mention the future of the nation we all treasured.

  And so two soldiers, two NCOs, and one officer watched President-elect Obama’s speech in a dusty, dirty room in the center of Iraq at five or so in the morning, putting all the distress and chaos and rage of war on hold, determining that nothing mattered more at this time than what we watched on the screen before us. Some of us were black, some of us were white, and some of us were brown—a fact that, when I realized it, caused me to search for a joke in order to temper the politically correct banality of the situation. I wanted to somehow include the absurdity of the word “postracial” in the quip but never got around to it. Instead, I got goose bumps when President-elect Obama said, “To those who would tear the world down: We will defeat you. To those who seek peace and security: We support you. And to all those who have wondered if America’s beacon still burns as bright: Tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope.” I didn’t feel like joking around anymore.

  Why do I keep fighting it, I wondered. Voting from a combat zone had been one of the proudest moments of my life. Embrace it.

  After the speech ended, Specialist Gonzo came up and slapped me on the back. “What did you think, sir? Pretty good, huh?”

  I raised my eyebrows and nodded slowly. “Yeah, man. Pretty good.”

  I sat on the couch for another hour, unable to tear myself away from the election day coverage. Soldiers, NCOs, and officers who had slept the night before cycled in, asking about the results. Some smiled, some cursed, some had no reaction whatsoever. Then I ate breakfast and went to work. My nighttime escape as an American citizen ended, while my daily life as a counterinsurgent in Iraq continued. Nothing could’ve felt more oddly comforting at the time.

  FUN AND GAMES

  The Stryker hit the ramp of the steel-beam bridge with power, rolling across the platform like an avalanche of metal. I looked over the side from the back hatch where I stood, absorbing the muddy, milky Tigris River in all its twisting glory. We traveled through the Sunni marshlands on winding back roads, waving to the local Iraqis we passed and honking at the donkey carts that got in our way. The urban void of Hussaniyah loomed austerely to our east.

  An hour before, back on Camp Taji for my monthly personal refit, I had planned on hitching a ride back to JSS Istalquaal with the mortarmen/tanker combo platoon. Minutes before our departure though, Captain Frowny-Face informed the platoon sergeants who shared leadership duties for the platoon, Sergeant First Class C and Sergeant First Class W, that he needed them to check out a tip regarding the targeted JAM member Qusay al-Juma immediately. Qusay, who allegedly accidentally blew up an EFP in a trash can the day before at a car garage, had led Lieutenant Dirty Jerz and his platoon on a wild goose chase that night, barely getting away at least three or four times. He knew himself to be a wanted man but was either too stupid or not resourceful enough to get out of town. When SFC W came up to tell me about their frago, he didn’t give me much of a choice as to whether I would join them or not.

  Hussaniyah, muddy and desolate, after a heavy rain. A moderately-sized city located north of Sadr City, Hussaniyah was a proving ground for many Jaish al-Mahdi insurgents eager to make a name for themselves.

  “Hey, sir
,” he said, flashing his pearly whites, “get your out-of-the-wire face back on, ’cause we’re going on a raid! You can play platoon leader, too, since our lieutenant is back on Istalquaal.”

  “Well,” I replied, deadpan, “when you sell it like that . . .”

  The twists and turns of Route Crush eventually straightened out, and we wove through the maze of wire and Sons of Iraq guarding the front entrance to Sheik Modhir’s residence. We turned north on Route Dover, now parallel with the T-wall barriers that lined most of Hussaniyah’s perimeter. One of the first techniques in the security step of a counterinsurgency was controlling the entrances and exits of urban centers. A lot of the intricacies of this depended on a city’s geographical layout, but in Hussaniyah’s case, due to the large canal that sliced across its eastern boundary, doing so proved relatively simple; thus, the city was sealed off on all sides except for three NP-controlled traffic points on the western side. We turned right through one of these points onto Route Texas, NPs waving our Strykers through the Iraqi cars and pedestrians with all the flamboyance of a conductor at an orchestra.

  We rolled up to our target grid in the center of Hussaniyah near the main market, finding a small, one-story house whose roof had caved in on one end. We operated in a cramped intersection with only the house in question on one side of the road and a cluster of four red buildings across the street from us, all being two or three stories tall. The market lay on the backside of these buildings. The platoon established a vehicle box cordon around the house, and I joined the dismounts on the ground. As I walked behind the squads, I eyed the tall buildings across from us suspiciously. I found nothing but shadows and black holes through the shattered windowpanes, and nothing moved at all along the rooftops.

  “Don’t worry about it, sir,” SFC C said with a wink and a grin, jogging past me. “If they’re gonna get you from there, you won’t even feel it.”

  I pushed away the paranoia and forced myself to focus on the mission at hand. I smirked and stopped thinking. The rest felt easy.

  The platoon found nothing but a middle-aged woman and an old woman in the house, both claiming that they had never heard of Qusay al-Juma. I fell into my old role of platoon leader rather naturally, if unfortunately temporarily, and talked with the two women through our interpreter while the men searched the house and the surrounding premises. The women told us that the old woman’s son, who was also the middle-aged woman’s husband, had bought the house four months before, but he worked in Baghdad and only came up to Hussaniyah on weekends. Their paperwork all checked out, and the husband’s name didn’t ring any JAM bells for me or for SFC C or SFC W. As I finished up with the Iraqis, thanking them for their patience and understanding, I heard confused shouting outside. I broke away from the conversation and trotted to the front door.

  Outside, all of the dismounted soldiers had taken cover behind the Strykers or poles or in a nearby ditch and had oriented their weapons in the direction of the red buildings across the street. The Stryker gunners huddled down in their cupolas, machine guns scanning the rooftops. I huddled in the doorframe and yelled at SFC W, who I spotted behind the nearest Stryker.

  “What the fuck is going on?”

  “The guys think they saw a weapon over there!” He pointed at the red buildings, although I couldn’t discern exactly where I needed to look. “As soon as they pointed it out, it disappeared behind the building!”

  “What kind of weapon?” I shouted.

  “They think they saw an RPG launcher!”

  Well, I thought, this fucking sucks. Things could get messy really fast. If the mystery man with an RPG really did move back to the market area, no limit to potential disaster existed. Hussaniyah’s main market functioned as a sort of neo-Stalingrad in terms of urban combat hell. Usually, American troops didn’t go in there with anything less than two full combat platoons; the Iraqi police avoided it like the plague, and the National Police only operated there when they got forced to. The reason was simple: Although it was the best place in the area to purchase local fruits and vegetables, the market doubled as a labyrinth of back alleys and alley backs, shops and tight corners and limited fields of view, the ideal setting for booby traps, antipersonnel mines, and close-quarter snipers. No matter how familiar any of us may have been with the market’s configuration, we’d never understand it as well as the native Iraqis. In short, if we pursued a fight into the market, we’d be operating on the guerilla’s terrain, not ours. I knew things could spiral out of control very soon and very quickly.

  A small shape emerged from the side of a building. It looked like a small child.

  “Nobody shoot!” I heard SFC C yell loudly somewhere to my front and off to my left. “Nobody shoot! It’s a damn kid!”

  As the small shape in the distance came into my view, I spotted an object in the child’s hand. My own rifle dropped back to the low-ready—I hadn’t even noticed raising it—and I saw all of the soldiers in front of me relax their postures as well. When I walked up to the semicircle just behind SFC W and the interpreter, I realized that the object in question was a plastic RPG launcher. Though it was not as large as a real RPG-7, the difference would have been impossible to discern from a distance of any sizable amount.

  “Where’d you get this?” SFC W asked the kid, grabbing the plastic toy from him.

  The child, a rail-thin skeleton dressed in a white Nike shirt that hung to his knees with burnt red mud smudged all over his face, looked meekly at the ground, clearly upset that his toy had just been taken away from him. The interpreter yelled at him in Arabic for a few seconds, and finally the boy replied. “Some men handed them out at the market yesterday. All of my friends got one.”

  SFC C, SFC W, and I all exchanged troubled glances. “Who were the men?”

  “I don’t know. I’d never seen them before.”

  “They just started handing these out?”

  “Yes. Only to kids.”

  “Why?”

  “They said Americans would want to play with us if we had them.”

  “How many were handed out?”

  “I don’t know, ten, maybe fifteen.”

  After we told the boy that he wasn’t in trouble and we wouldn’t tell his parents on him, but that we were taking his toy RPG launcher, we instructed him to tell his friends to throw away their toys. He claimed he understood why, but he kept eyeing his old toy greedily.

  “I guess the golden groups and special groups of JAM are hoping for a public relations disaster from us,” I said as we walked back to our Strykers. “Fucking insane.”

  SFC W, who held the toy RPG launcher, simply shook his head. “That is some fucked up shit.”

  I nodded in agreement. “No joke. COIN can be wild. My buddy up north said they sometimes hand out Viagra to old sheiks to gain their allegiance. He says it works, too. I mean, seriously, if an old man hasn’t had sex for twenty years, he’s going to be beyond loyal to the guys who bring a magic blue pill that makes it happen again.”

  SFC W laughed. “That’s crazy, but a good idea. But this. . . .” He looked down at the plastic toy and started banging it against his chest plate. “They’re deliberately putting their own people’s children in harm’s way, hoping we make a mistake and kill one. What the hell is wrong with them?”

  “I don’t know,” I responded, shrugging my shoulders. I wanted to care more deeply and knew that I should, but I couldn’t bring myself to actually do it. I’d been in Iraq for too long to be shocked by much, even this. “I don’t know.”

  It did feel nice being the palpable good guys again after a few months of confusing ambiguity. It made us feel like liberators instead of an occupational force. We drove back to JSS Istalquaal and threw the plastic RPG launcher away. Two more of the toys were recovered over the course of the next three months, with tragedy somehow avoided each time.

  INVASION

  The Iraq we knew and understood and fought for and fought against and fought in changed utterly and completely in one w
eek in late November 2008. On a macro level, on November 27 the Iraqi parliament passed the Iraq Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), which established a timeline for U.S. combat forces to withdraw from the cities and laid out a variety of other technical regulations for our future presence in theater. Only a few days later, our battalion headquarters and staff moved from Camp Taji to JSS Istalquaal, joining the two line companies already permanently stationed there. This revolutionized our experience on a micro level.

  Macro and micro crashed into one another on Thanksgiving Day, the same day the SOFA passed. With battalion putting the finishing touches on their big move, the officers and the NCOs gathered at JSS Istalquaal for the Wolfhounds’ annual Turkey Bowl flag-football game. No doubt inspired by my one reception for six yards—Lieutenant Mongo’s dominant performance as quarterback, defensive tackle, and all-around crusher of dreams probably helped as well—the officers won rather handily, much to the chagrin of the battalion sergeant major. As we gathered postgame for an ample meal prepared by the cooks, the discussion at the junior officers’ table revolved around how the SOFA impacted us at the ground level.

  “I think it’s the real reason battalion is moving out here,” Lieutenant Rant explained, while we all gorged on sliced turkey, sweet potatoes, and cornbread. “The SOFA calls for all the combat outposts and JSSs to close by next year, right? And all Americans have to be out of the cities at the same time, right?”

  “Uh huh,” Lieutenant Goo said, drawing out his response.

  “Well, technically this place is out of Hussaniyah. That’s why they keep expanding it. They are just going to turn this place into a FOB. That way, we won’t have to shut it down or turn it over to the Iraqis next year.”

  “Ooooooohhhh.” Lieutenant Goo’s reactions rarely failed to entertain.

  “That might explain why they are so insistent that battalion move out here now,” Captain Pistol Pete said. “I mean, we got three months left. Really, what the hell is the point?”