House to House: A Tale of Modern War (5 page)

Today, we will find out. Our Brads deliver us to our firing range, just outside the wire. Usually, we shoot at pop-up targets, human silhouettes that allow us to hone our marksmanship and zero our weapons, making sure our gunsights are accurately adjusted. Not today. We pull out a couple of plates from our body armor and set them up at various intervals on the range. The plates hold up well, even against our armor-piercing rounds. This is good news and bad news. Our equipment is world-class, but some of our enemies will be wearing it.

Finally, with our SAWs, we discover a weakness. If we hit the plates with multiple concentrated bursts of fire, our rounds will penetrate the slab of armor that protects a soldier’s heart and lungs. When we’re done, the plates look like sieves. And this discovery, too, has a dual effect on morale—the enemy has captured our SAWs. We’re in an arms race with ourselves—we know how to kill our enemy, but he can kill us in the same way.

Next, we work on ways to blow up Texas barriers. We operate with Bradleys and tanks for this exercise, and discover that a main gun round from an Abrams tank is the best option. The 120mm shell demolishes even the thickest concrete barrier. As yet we have no reason to believe the insurgents have captured any tanks.

After lunch, our battalion Command Sergeant Major, forty-six-year-old Steve Faulkenburg, shows up with a cache of leftover Eastern bloc goodies. He arms himself with RPGs and AK-47s and takes aim at a couple of wrecked Humvees that were dragged onto the range. He blasts the vehicles with rockets and small-arms fire, pausing every few minutes to inspect the damage. He searches for weak spots in the armor system. All afternoon, he goes about this chore and takes copious notes. Finally satisfied, Faulkenburg sets off to design extra pieces of “hillbilly armor” to cover our vulnerable spots.

We move to the vehicle range and work with the Bradleys and M1A2 Abrams tanks, practicing our breaching techniques on fortified houses. For weeks now, we have been working around the clock. Day after day, night after night, the manic routine grinds us down. We rehearse our breaching roles, refine our room-clearing fundamentals. Every mission into Muqdadiyah serves as an operational training exercise. We polish our tactics; we cross-train on different weapons systems. Every man in the platoon is now intimately familiar with everything in our arsenal. Every man can drive a Bradley and work a radio. Every man in my squad goes through combat lifesaver medical classes. I tell them they must be their own medics.

At the same time, we carry on with our twelve-to fifteen-hour combat patrols around Diyala. We’re training for a fight while continuing to be in one. It leaves us brittle and bone-weary.

Toward sunset, we finally knock off. The tanks roll back across the road into the base. My platoon stays behind, tasked with guarding the sandbags and pop-up targets from marauding Iraqi thieves. The locals will steal anything.

It is easy duty, and I stretch out on the ramp of one of our Bradleys. Fitts limps over and sits down next to me. With Sergeant Cantrell on leave, Fitts is our acting platoon sergeant.

“Not to alarm you, but I am beginning to develop early stages of pretraumatic stress disorder. I want to officially go on the record to say that I am pretty sure we’re all gonna die, dude,” I say with as much sarcasm as I can muster.

Fitts grins. “You know, you are a difficult subordinate.”

“Maybe you just can’t handle me as a subordinate,” I shoot back. He has already reorganized the platoon, which is sure to piss off Cantrell when he returns.

As the two of us smoke and joke, watching the Iraqi sun sinking on the horizon, Captain Sean Sims, our company commander, appears and steps past us to climb inside our Bradley. He sits down and props his feet up. He’s been tense and short-tempered ever since we got the orders for Fallujah. I’ve also seen him head to the call center almost every night to talk with his wife. Prior to October, he rarely did that.

“Staff Sergeant Fitts and Staff Sergeant Bellavia. How are you two gentlemen doing?”

I am a little surprised by Sims’s friendly tone. When Fitts returned to us over the summer, his wounds only half-healed, our captain tried to kick him out of the company. Fitts had pissed him off by bashing a hostile Muqdadiyah police officer in the face with his Kevlar helmet. Staff sergeants often piss off the higher-ups, but Fitts was particularly good at it.

“We’re good, sir. You?” Fitts replies cautiously.

Captain Sims and I also have a tense relationship. In April during the house-to-house fighting in Muqdadiyah, we fought as disparate squads with little overall coordination. I later heard that Sims never left his Bradley during the fight. A commander who leads on the ground is always more desirable than one who stays in an armored vehicle. After that, I questioned his judgment on the battlefield. Later, our relationship almost fractured after I had my squad shoot three IED-laying Iraqis who turned out to be the nephews of a local good guy, an Iraqi security officer. Instead of believing my version of the events, he took sworn statements from my men and even considered opening a formal investigation. Sims dropped it at the urging of our company executive officer and other elements of our company leadership, but the incident created an uncomfortable rift between us.

Captain Sims watches the sunset in silence. Not sure he had heard us, I ask, “How are you, sir?”

“I have been better.”

We can tell. He looks exhausted, and he has a quarter-sized stress zit marring his face. Since the news broke, Sims has worked relentlessly. He rarely sleeps. Instead, he pores over incoming intel reports, studying and restudying the plans the battalion staff produces. He sat for hours at night with Captain Doug Walter, our previous company commander, discussing details and working through new ideas.

Captain Sims even wanted to use Muqdadiyah for a final dress rehearsal before Fallujah. He proposed that the full task force do a cordon and search of the city, clearing every room and every house. I thought this was a brilliant idea, and it showed Sims had a lot of nuts to even pitch it. Of course, battalion command nixed the idea, afraid that such a heavy hand would stir up the locals. Nevertheless, the fact that he wanted to do it gave us newfound respect for our commander. We don’t give a shit about stirring up the locals; as far as we’re concerned, they’re already stirred up. Using maximum force is exactly what we want to do.

Captain Sims takes his eyes off the sunset and turns to us. “What do you think about the training?”

Neither Fitts nor I hesitate. We give him some input, and he takes notes. I am astonished. He’s never listened to me like this before.

We talk shop as dusk overtakes us. It is clear that Captain Sims genuinely wants our opinion. Eventually, the conversation takes another turn.

“Where are you both from?” Sims asks.

“Randolph, Mississippi,” replies Fitts.

“Buffalo, New York,” I answer.

“Why’d you two join the infantry?”

I reply first, “Stephen Sondheim.”

“What?”

Both Fitts and Sims stare at me.

“Stephen fucking Sondheim.”

“You mean the composer?” asked Sims.

“What the fuck are you talking about, bro?” says Fitts. So there’s one thing about me the guy doesn’t know.

“I was a theater major,” I begin to explain.

“No fucking way.”

“Sure. Musical theater direction and stagecraft. I ended up starting my own theater company in Buffalo. Sondheim, well, I loved his work. He was my idol, man.”

“This is a very different side of you, Sergeant Bellavia.”

“He wrote a musical called
Assassins.
Basically disenfranchised Americans kill presidents, except that he got his history all screwed up. John Wilkes Booth commits suicide, Leon Czolgosz kills McKinley over a girl, Lee Harvey Oswald actually shoots JFK—shit like that.”

I take a drag on my cigarette. Both Fitts and Sims are just staring at me. I guess a grizzled infantryman who loves Sondheim is more shocking than one who loves Michael Moore.

“Okay, so I rewrote it to make it historically accurate and show why these losers killed our presidents. When my theater company put it on, Sondheim stopped my show and threatened to sue me. I called his bluff. Only he wasn’t bluffing.

“Next thing I know I’m field-dressing machine guns.”

Sims and Fitts burst out laughing.

I ask Captain Sims, “What made you go infantry, sir? How’d you end up here?”

“My dad was a colonel in Vietnam. I went to Texas A&M. Married the love of my life, decided to join the army. My dad told me that I could be whatever I wanted to be, but nobody would respect me unless I started out in the infantry. And I loved it, so here I am.”

He paused, then added, “I have a little boy. Sergeant Fitts, you have two children, right?”

“Three kids now, sir. Two boys and a two-year-old she-devil who runs my life.”

“Are you married, Sergeant Bell?” Sims asks.

“I am. We have a four-year-old boy, Evan.”

Sims looks off in the distance again. The sharing of personal details strikes me as almost unprofessional, until it dawns on me that Captain Sims is trying to do something here. He is breaking bread with us, making peace. Settling our differences.

“How are your men doing?” Sims asks.

“They’re great. They’re all great kids,” says Fitts.

“We’re lucky, sir.”

“How do they feel about the intelligence reports?”

“Well,” I begin, “I painted a green arrow in our living area. It points east. I figure we might as well get them used to praying six times a day now.”

I know the men are ready, but they are also tense. In recent days, all the typical bitching and bickering common among infantrymen has evaporated. Those with grudges have made peace with one another. Even Cantrell did that before he left on leave earlier in the month.

One night, Cantrell was walking back to the platoon area when Sergeant Major Steve Faulkenburg spotted him and drove up in a Humvee. He told Cantrell to climb aboard. The two men seemed to detest each other. It hadn’t started that way, but conflicts early in the deployment had hurt their relationship. Here was the opportunity to bury the hatchet. When Faulkenburg said good-bye to Cantrell, he looked him in the eye and remarked, “You know, we won’t be able to bring them all back.”

Our platoon sergeant nodded grimly. “I know, but we’ll handle it head on.”

The same spirit of reconciliation drove Captain Sims to share this sunset with us. Already the past weeks have changed my view of him. Uncertain in battle, perhaps, Sims is in his element when planning and preparing for a set-piece event. He has no ego invested in his ideas, and he genuinely seeks input to make the company even more capable, even more fierce.

“You know what, sir?” I finally say, “we’re gonna be all right.”

Fitts looks around, spits chaw in the dust near the ramp. “The way I figure it, sir, Fallujah can’t be worse than hearing Sergeant Bell bitch at me every five seconds for not having enough batteries or forty-millimeter rounds. This guy is unbelievable. What a pain in the ass.”

“Sergeant Bell, are you demanding?” Sims said in mock astonishment.

“I have needs, sir,” I explain. “Sergeant Cantrell met those needs. This new guy you brought in—he’s such a dick. Doctrinally proficient, sure. But he’s just not a people person.”

Fitts scoffs, “People person.”

Sims chuckles, but soon grows contemplative again. He’s not finished with us. After another long pause, he asks, “Did you know Staff Sergeant Rosales well?”

Rosales was killed during an engagement on our way to Najaf in the spring. His vehicle had been targeted, and he’d been hit. Despite his wounds, he stayed in the fight, shooting his weapon until he died. He never once let anyone know he’d been wounded.

“Yeah, sir, I knew him. We all did,” I explain, “He was a great guy. His wife was over in finance, so they deployed together. They had a little boy.”

We had named our makeshift shooting range after Rosales, but Fitts seemed bitter about it. “And what do we give him? This piece of shit range in his honor.”

I nod my head. “Yeah. When people die in the army, it isn’t like the real world. They die and it’s just like they went on leave or went to a new station. It isn’t real till it’s over, I guess.”

Sims nods his head, “It sure seems that way, doesn’t it.”

“When you get home, sir, sit your little boy down with your dad. You tell him about us, okay? Our war. The way we fought. They can’t touch us. They’ll never touch us. We’re gonna be all right.”

“Spoken like a man who has never been shot repeatedly.”

Fitts has been throwing that down a lot recently.

“Dude, I gotta hear this story again?”

Sims grinned, “It gets better every time I hear it.”

“April 9, 2004. We face a company-sized element.”

“Bullshit, it was a twelve-year-old with a .22 rifle.”

Fitts shrugs, “Well, that little fucker could shoot.”

Fitts hikes up his pant leg and sleeves, and we see the damage. The scars of that day in Muqdadiyah will always mark him, like bad tattoos.

The sight of them sobers Captain Sims. He slides off the bench inside the Bradley and jumps to the ground next to the ramp. Turning, he makes eye contact with us both.

“You two are the best squad leaders in the battalion. Everyone knows that. And everyone looks to you two to set the example.” The compliment catches both of us off guard. “We’re going to lose people.”

“We know, sir.”

“We’re going to be tested. We will all be tested.”

Silence. We wait.

“The only way we’ll make it through this is to stay together.”

We nod our heads. Sims is speaking from his heart.

“I am proud of the men,” he manages. “I am proud to lead Alpha Company into the fight.”

“Hooah, sir.”

“Thank you, sir.”

I needed him to say all this. As I watch Captain Sims move off into the growing darkness, my entire view of him has changed in less than twenty minutes.

I’d die for this man.

Fitts and I stay on the ramp, the silence between us like a cocoon. The sun is long gone, and we stare into the blackness.