War Flower

by Brooke King

“You’re kidding,” I said, as I looked at him, confused. “Tell me you’re kidding, Sarge.”

  “You want him gone?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well . . . ,” he said, “what are you waiting for?”

  “Sarge, you’re joking, right?”

  Sergeant Lippert put his shades back on, looked at the boy, then at me, and shook his head. “Watch and learn, King.” Sergeant Lippert walked toward the boy.

  “Sarge, you can’t possibly . . .” I inched forward. “I mean, shit. You can’t do that.”

  Sergeant Lippert turned around. “You don’t like it, turn your fucking head.”

  Sergeant Lippert stopped in front of the boy, pulled out his side pistol, pointed it at the kid’s face, and said, “Rooh b’eed, motherfucker.” The kid looked up at Sergeant Lippert, whose barrel was almost touching the tip of his nose, then at me. I moved in front of Sergeant Lippert’s pistol.

  “No.” I pushed the barrel down. “You can’t fucking do that.” I turned around and looked at the kid. “Run.” I pushed him away. “Run.”

  The boy took off running down the road until he disappeared around the corner. Sergeant Lippert and I watched until the boy was out of sight, then he turned around, holstered his pistol, and said, “You’re welcome,” as he walked around to the other side of the HET and began calling for a forklift to haul the barriers off the trailer.

  He looked back at me as I stood there staring at where the kid had rounded the corner in a sprint. “King, what the fuck you waiting on, the second coming of Christ? Let’s go.”

  I snapped out of it and walked toward where he stood at the front of the HET. As I was about to walk past him, Sergeant Lippert grabbed the handle of the back of my vest, put his mouth close to my ear, and whispered, “Next time I tell you not to fucking give the kids candy, don’t fucking give them shit, you hear me?”

  I nodded, looking forward at the forklift coming our way.

  “Good,” he said, as he shoved me forward.

  Language was a barrier that didn’t matter, and because it didn’t matter, we didn’t give a shit about the people. The only thing that mattered was our language and our way of doing things. We didn’t know boundaries. We carried out the missions the way we saw fit, busting open doors, raiding houses, trashing rooms, desecrating prayer rugs, and kicking over shrines to Muhammad. The only respect we had was for each other and the American flag stitched onto the right shoulder of our uniform, and because of that the only communication we had with the local nationals came through brute force. But soon, after the first year in Iraq, we had no leads on enemy forces and we were forced to interrogate the locals, which always proved to be a challenge. Soldiers started to raid houses, dragging along a coalition forces interpreter to help get information about the area, but we couldn’t trust the information or the locals. We never knew if they were giving us good intel or if they were setting us up for an attack. Because we couldn’t trust them, we didn’t care if they lived or died. Everyone was treated with hostility. We didn’t know the customs of Islam or what traditions the locals held true to, and because of that, we didn’t know the people or their way of life. We didn’t know what to make of their daily life. Every move they made became suspicious activity. Staring at a group of soldiers meant they were plotting a suicide bombing, walking slowly next to the road meant they were trying to find the best place to plant an IED, and meandering around the outside of a house meant they were trying to gather information about troop movements. Goat herders who moved their flocks in the middle of the day across busy roads were presumed to be doing it intentionally, to block the roads. The machine gunners opened up fire on the herds, making any goat in the road .50 cal fodder. Even little children became widely accepted among the soldiers as TITs, or terrorists in training. Because we didn’t know the Iraqi people and didn’t care to, we “othered” them, forcing them into degrading positions by shoving their faces into the dirt and putting pistols to the men’s groins. We defiled their houses by walking in with our shoes on, wiping the dirt from our boots on their prayer rugs. We rounded up the women and children and moved them into the bedroom while we beat and tortured the men in the living room, hoping to get information out of them. The men, women, and children of Iraq were no longer people. They were all terrorists.

  In the first wave after the initial push into Iraq, brutality and ethnic othering became commonplace; pointing weapons at innocent children became standard and calling them derogatory names was just what we called them. The people of Iraq became known as sand niggers, mujes, towel heads, dune coons, hajjis, and camel jockeys. Iraq became known as the sandbox and bum fuck nowhere. Standard operating procedures no longer existed—we ran on general orders, and when they became too vague to use in combat, we disregarded them when shit hit the fan. Our armor became obsolete, and anything fabricated onto a vehicle became known as pulling a Frankenstein. Black Hawks became known as army lawn darts, and Humvees were dubbed IED detectors. If you weren’t on the FOB, you were outside the wire. If you were lucky enough to pull a desk job, you were labeled a fobbit and made fun of because you were too chickenshit to fight. Some FOBs even had nicknames. LSA Anaconda became known as Bombaconda, and Camp Liberty became renowned for its one-lane road nicknamed Easy Street. What we wore every day out on mission became a burden. TA-50 was now called battle rattle. It was anywhere from fifty to a hundred fucking pounds of gear that consisted of a combat vest, the arm protectors that we called bullshit wings, a throat protector that only covered half your throat, a green Kevlar helmet with an ACU helmet cover that when knocked against another one was called turtle fucking, twelve magazines of ammo that attach to the front of your combat vest in six magazine pouches, elbow and knee pads that made it hard to run or move quickly without looking like a complete fucking idiot, gloves to keep your hands from burning against the metal of your weapon, eye protection for the sun and shrapnel, and sometimes a pistol with an extra magazine to accompany your M4 or M16 rifle, which was always nicknamed for an ex-lover.

  OIF, or operation Iraqi fucking, turned into OEF, operation everyone’s fucked.

  Since the last bullshit war that U.S. soldiers were forced to fight in, war tactics had changed—the type of combat seen on the battlefields was different. No longer were we fighting in open spaces in the jungle, where everything blended in a hodgepodge of foliage. This time we were fighting in desert conditions surrounded by an urban environment, where buildings, alleyways, and corners all proved to be your enemy. The type of war had changed. Weapons used against us became more deadly. They were buried in the dirt with a pressure plate on top, inside the trunks of cars that would drive toward you at fast speeds before blowing up, in piles of trash on the side of the road, sewed into cadavers of people and carcasses of dogs, strapped around women and children, rigged to doors, and almost all of them were detonated remotely, from a cell phone. It seemed at times that even our weapons were being used against us, bought and purchased in the aftermath of the Cold War. Mortar rounds penetrated our bases, hitting our chow halls, hooches, communications towers, and motor pools.

  We didn’t know the war would take this long to fight. We didn’t have a sense of time, and each passing day began to lessen our drive to keep going, and the war fervor that we once had when we first arrived boots on ground no longer existed. It disappeared along with all the other familiar things that gave us hope of surviving.

  By the end of December 2006 the cold had hit the air in Baghdad, turning the saturated muddy ground into a crisp, crackled earth with a lightly frosted white topcoat. The cold, icy air ate at your uncovered nose, cheeks, and ears, turning them a soft shade of pink.

  I sat hunched over a technical manual trying to figure out a shortcut to rewiring the wiring harness on the forklift I was suppose to work on tomorrow. It was the only thing I could do to keep myself distracted from the fact that I was still on the recovery team and under the leadership of Sergeant Lippert. I had finally figured out the wiring schemati
c when he walked through the closed flap of the tent hangar.

  “They’re going to kill that son of a bitch next week.”

  I looked up. “Kill who?”

  “Saddam,” he said, setting his rifle next to mine in the weapons rack. “The verdict’s in; that motherfucker’s going to die.” He pulled the chair up next to me and sat down. “That asshole thought he could hide forever.” He shook his head and laughed.

  “Wait, what does this mean?”

  Sergeant Lippert glanced at me. I looked down at the schematic and said, “I mean, does this mean the war’s over—we can go home?”

  “Hell no, Private, what made you think that?”

  “Well, we came here to get that asshole and now that they’re going to kill him. . . . I mean, it’s lights out, end of story, case is closed. We can fucking go home now.”

  “It isn’t that simple.”

  “What do you mean it isn’t that simple? We got him. All the Iraqi court has to do is kill him and then we can go home. That sounds pretty fucking simple to me.”

  “We have to stay and help the country get back on its feet.”

  “Well, fuck that!” I shouted as I stood up. “We’ve been here long enough in this fucking country.” I pointed my finger at the ground. “This is horse shit, Sarge, and you know it. Those fucking people don’t want our help. They want us the fuck out of their country, and I’m happy to oblige.”

  “Watch it. There are still innocent people out there that need our help.”

  “Fuck that, Sarge.” Realizing that I was crossing the line by yelling at Sergeant Lippert, I looked down at the ground. “I mean, we’ve done enough for these fucking A-rabs.” I started to clench my fists. Too upset to stand, I sat back down. “We’ve done enough.”

  “Easy now.” Sergeant Lippert stood up and started walking toward me. “You’re working yourself up over nothing.”

  Sergeant Lippert put his hand on my shoulder. “This is bullshit, Sarge.” I pushed his hand off my shoulder, stood up, and backed away from him toward the middle of the bay. “I should be able to go home now. I’ve done my duty.”

  “I have a wife and kids at home. You think I want to stay here? Fuck no, but there are times when you just have to suck it the fuck up and drive on, and riding out the rest of this deployment is one of those times. Now get your ass over here.” He waved me over to where he was standing. “And calm the fuck down.”

  With tears in my eyes, I walked over to him. “This is bullshit, Sarge, and you know it.”

  “All right, King, all right.”

  “It’s fucking bullshit,” I said, sitting down in the chair. I looked up at him, tears spilling down my face.

  “I know, King, I know,” Sergeant Lippert said as he patted me on the back, grabbed his rifle, and walked toward the opening of the tent. He stopped short, grabbed his pack of smokes from his cargo pants pocket even though he didn’t smoke, and said, “Come on, let’s go.”

  I stood up, wiped the tears from my face with the sleeve of my ACU, picked up my rifle, and started walking out of the tent hangar with Sergeant Lippert. “I hope they fry that motherfucker tomorrow until he’s charbroiled.”

  “They’re going to hang him.”

  “That fucker deserves more than that.”

  As we walked past our HET, Sergeant Lippert laughed and said, “I’m not arguing with you on that one, King. I’m not arguing with you one bit.”

  For me it wasn’t a matter of whether or not Saddam deserved it. It was a matter of survival, and if I was going to survive this war, I had to shut out my emotions, turn off my humanity, and get used to the thought of killing people, something that in the end would either ruin me or make me a better soldier.

  *

  We didn’t know guilt or remorse. We didn’t know how to turn off the kill switch. We didn’t know the type of power that came with the weapons we wielded. We used them as a scare tactic, a way to induce fear in the Iraqi people. Pointing and jabbing the end of the muzzle at them, we shouted commands. “Stop or I’ll shoot!” They always walked toward us, never stopping to question the words we shouted from behind machine guns. We fired warning shots off on either side of them, making them dance from one side to the other as they tried to move out of the path of each bullet. Most times the women would stop and raise their hands to the sky, shaking their palms up in the air to prove that they were unarmed, but we fired at them anyway. The children, who didn’t know any better, still advanced our position. We shot at them again and again.

  Some soldiers were nice to the children. Some were cruel.

  Outside checkpoint 2, several miles from Camp Liberty, I watched the cruelty of a soldier who had been in theater too long, jaded by the war. He pointed his M4 at a boy walking down the street. The boy didn’t stop but kept advancing, so the soldier shot his weapon to one side of the child. With each shot, the boy was moved closer and closer to the edge of the sidewalk. Heavy midday traffic lined the streets, cautiously passing the Bradley tanks that sat on each side of the roadway. Our convoy had stopped at the checkpoint to drop off supplies, water mostly. Leaning up against my Humvee fifteen feet away, I watched the soldier turn to his buddy and say, “I hope that kid gets far enough over, so we don’t have to interrogate him.” They both laughed, and then I watched in disbelief as the soldier fired again on the right side of a boy who was still walking down the street with a stick in one hand and a half-deflated soccer ball in the other. The boy jumped closer to the edge of the sidewalk, dropped the stick and the soccer ball, and stood still with his arms up. The soccer ball bounced twice and then rolled off the edge of the curb and into the road. The soldier turned to his buddy again and said, “Watch this. One more shot and we’re in the clear.” The soldier fired again and the boy hopped off the sidewalk and into the path of the busy street traffic. A delivery truck slammed into the boy, striking him in the back. I watched in horror from fifteen feet away, next to the Humvee, as the boy’s body was hurled underneath the truck’s undercarriage and dragged along by the exhaust manifold before it caught on the asphalt. His body tumbled toward the back of the truck until the back wheel finally ran over the boy’s head and split it open like a pistachio shell, spattering brain matter and blood on the truck’s mud flaps. The soccer ball rolled into the gutter as the truck came to a screeching halt on the roadway.

  The soldier looked back at his battle buddy and said, “You know my mom taught me never to go into the street after my soccer ball.”

  For most of us, we didn’t know how to feel in the moments when it mattered, whether to cry or smile, whether to be angry at the death of a fellow soldier or to be relieved that it wasn’t you. We didn’t know whether bravery was just stupidity in disguise or whether courage was just another form of fear. We didn’t know what victory felt like or what self-sacrifice meant anymore. We didn’t know the enemy or where to find them. We didn’t know what was a bomb or what was just a pile of trash on the side of the road. We didn’t know what our missions were for or why we were really fighting. We didn’t know if it was for freedom, justice, or oil. On any given day outside the wire, we didn’t know who would make it back or who would be hitching a one-way ticket on the black bag express. We didn’t know the names of the streets or which roads led to nowhere. When shit hit the fan, sometimes we didn’t know which direction to fire the bullets. We didn’t know what honor or pride was or how we could find them. We didn’t know the ties that connected our lives to each other, all of us dependent on the other to survive.

  In the end the only thing we knew for certain was that we were all soldiers stuck in the same godforsaken country until the military let us leave or we died, whichever came first.

  Commo Hill

  Camp Liberty was connected like a grid to Camp Victory and BIAP. Located near Saddam’s palaces, the base had one main road that ran the length of the base. In the very middle of the base Commo Hill stood with four massive antenna towers looming, breaking up the beauty of a sunrise with their
metal intrusions.

  One of the largest bases constructed since the Vietnam War, Camp Liberty housed contractors, coalition forces, and U.S. troops. Northeast of the trash burns and fueling stations, Liberty looked like a city within a city. Large concrete walls with concertina wire kept the unwanted out and held us prisoner inside. On either side of the gates that sporadically punctured the perimeter, large two-story block towers stood tall, backed by M1 Abrams tanks and heavy artillery auxiliaries. Zigzag concrete blockades shielded the gates from full frontal attacks by VBIEDs, and streetlights lined the road for five hundred feet, almost like a homing beacon sent out to the enemy, a spotlight just begging to be bombarded with mortars. Inside the base there was a PX, a Burger King, and even a Green Beans coffee joint that, if you had time, was a watering hole for soldiers. Every once in a while there was a lull in the fighting and work went on as usual, the base functioning as it normally would had it been a time of peace. Sometimes the quiet lasted too long, and soon you would become complacent, forgetting that this was not a normal base, that we were in fact in the middle of a war zone. Almost once a month Commo Hill would get hit, the incoming mortar rounds blasting the antennas down the side of the hill. We knew whenever it happened because the lights on base went dark, the internet went down, and mandatory roll call would ensue, followed by a weapons check. Some days the mortar rounds coming into base were too close for comfort, the Iraqi insurgents finding the proper maximum effective range of their explosions, the best place to hit to do the most damage. On most days they were off. But on December 30, 2006, the day Saddam Hussein was executed, they hit their mark quite clearly, their aim that day better than it had been in weeks.

  *

  It comes quickly—the sound of a mortar round as it crests the angle of hell and falls to the earth with a deathly whistle that is faint at first but becomes quieter than a whisper the closer it gets to you. They lock the position in, marking your location on a map, a place clearly thought out and triangulated flawlessly—the many weeks perfecting the trajectory of the round, the time it will take to make its target, and the blast radius it will create in rendering the target inert. It is a simple math equation meticulously planned to the exact moment when you are walking to a forklift just inside the motor pool wall. Cringing at the workload, you take an unsanctioned smoke break outside the motor pool before you start, but the cigarette isn’t even lit before the mortar descends; its warning is a weak conversation in your ear as you question whether to run or stand still, but fight or flight doesn’t register, only the need to hear the almost inaudible whistle. The sirens from the loudspeakers blare. “Warning: seek shelter. Incoming. Incoming.” You turn and look at the first sergeant who is standing in the middle of the motor pool shouting for everyone to get to a bunker, but there are none near you. You are alone next to the front entrance of the motor pool. Soldiers in the bunker several hundred yards away are yelling for everyone to take cover, but you know there is no point. The round will hit you, if the man in charge of releasing the payload of mortars that day has double checked his math. The whistle becomes a whisper, and then silence. You don’t move. It hits the hooches across the road from where you stand, and in an instant you become a Purple Heart candidate. But not today, because you are not a medal chaser. So shrapnel enters your leg, rips your flesh, and burns as it buries deep into your shin bone. At best you have a scar, at worst no leg. You are on the ground with no recollection of how you got there. Your head is pounding from where it hit the concrete barrier. You have a concussion or more likely a TBI. There is a searing pain in your leg. You don’t want to look at it. You don’t want to know if it’s there or not. But you can’t help yourself. You look. The leg is still there but is bleeding. You try to get up, but the leg cannot hold all of your weight, so you hobble to the bunker instead, everyone wondering what happened to you—why it took you so long to get to cover. You look at the ground and shrug your shoulder as you try to pretend that nothing is wrong with your shin. An hour later you are held up in the back of an LMTV with a first-aid kit from the cab of the truck, trying to pull out the tiniest piece of shrapnel from your shin with a shaky hand. There is blood seeping out of the wound, the gauze not nearly enough to stop the bleeding. You pour water over your hands, hoping they are sterile enough to do the job of tweezing the small piece of shrapnel out, but it is no use. The blood makes your hands slippery. Each tug on the metal brings shooting pain down your shin to your foot. You bite down on the collar of your uniform, hoping it will muffle the screams. It’s no use in trying to pull it out. It won’t budge. You leave it. Cover it up with gauze. Wrap a bandage around the wound. Pull down your pant leg and wash your blood off the bed of the truck with the rest of the water. The operating room is clean. You hop down out of the truck as best you can, holding onto the tailgate for support. You walk away. No one need know what happened. You don’t want to go back to rear D, where all the rejects, new soldiers, and pregnant women go. You don’t want everyone to think you’re a pussy. You’re a woman doing a man’s job, so you suck it the fuck up because in the end you’re no hero, you don’t deserve a Purple Heart for this; you’re just a casualty of a lucky shot, a mortar round aimed a little too perfectly that day.