House to House: A Tale of Modern War (8 page)

Piotr Sucholas looks stricken. His mother is a Polish immigrant and she has written Captain Sims to ask him not to let Piotr do anything dangerous. To protect his mother, Sucholas has created a whole fantasy deployment for her. He’s written long letters to her about life as a rear-echelon type, living the life of Riley inside the base compound. The truth is, he’s blossoming into a first-rate team leader who never flinches from a fight, and he will face this battle with new responsibility. He’s been my Bravo Team leader for only a few weeks. The burden of his new leadership role weighs heavily on him.

Despite how he looks right now, my intuition tells me he will be just fine. Outside of a firefight, he can be squirrelly as hell. When I made him my Bravo Team leader, Cantrell practically had kittens. “No way is that fucking meatball gonna be a team leader in my platoon. That kid is a fucking Martian.” Cantrell was probably thinking about all the dumb-ass things we’d all seen Sucholas do. The morning after we flew to Kuwait from Germany, out in the desert, Sucholas limped up to me and asked for help. Drunk the night before, he had accidentally stabbed himself with a knife, leaving a four-inch gash on one leg. He tried to balm it with superglue. More than anything, it petrified him that Cantrell might find out.

Sucholas could be a meatball. But Cantrell had never seen him in a fight. I had. On April 8, I watched him shoot an insurgent in the neck. The man fell and began to bleed out. Rather than finishing him, Sucholas waited patiently for the wounded man’s buddies to come to the rescue. Sure enough, three guys broke cover to get to their comrade, and Sucholas coolly dispatched all of them. He never panics, never recoils. He may look terrified now, but once we’re in the shit, I know he’ll be rock steady.

I don’t have to worry about Knapp either. He has so much confidence that it borders on arrogance. In garrison back in Germany, that arrogant streak irritated the shit out of me. Here in Iraq, it is a comfort. He is unflappable in a fight, and I have long since learned to depend on him.

Tonight, his jaw is set as he listens to my brief. He looks resolute. No fear in his eyes. Instead, he’s on top of everything and oozes professionalism. Frankly, he’s a brilliant noncommissioned officer—aggressive, confident, and willing to execute any order. I will rely heavily on him in the days to come.

Ruiz sits through my brief and periodically rubs the letters he’s written on his knuckles. He’s composed as ever. He’s ready. Ruiz can handle anything. I don’t have to worry about him either.

Private Brett Pulley, Sucholas’s rifleman and the squad’s most junior man, stares at me with a look of bafflement. He’s new and he’s green. The rest of us have had to work extra hard to keep Pulley from getting himself killed. His lack of experience is a burden we will all shoulder together.

Homeschooled and highly sheltered as a kid, Pulley wasn’t prepared to join the real world. Somehow, he fell into a job as a roadie for a rock band. When Pulley spoke of those days, his accounts were full of hard manual labor mixed with a steady diet of dope and booze. Squad leaders hear so many exaggerated stories of drugs and hardship from the lower enlisted ranks that rarely are they taken seriously. But Pulley’s tales of woe were told with long satellite delays of sentences. I often wonder if this is all an act, or if his brain really had been stewed in a pharmacological soup for such a long time that he is beyond hope.

I search Pulley’s face for any sign of comprehension. Does he understand the enormity of what we face? Where is the fear? A little fear is good; it will keep us on our toes.

“What the fuck you looking at, dick?” I try to rattle him.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing…asshole? Nothing…motherfucker? Nothing…faggot?”

“Nothing,
Sergeant.
”

Knapp jumps up and gets two inches from Pulley’s face.

“You better pull your fucking nuts out, Pulley, or you ain’t coming home. You hear me, bitch?”

“Roger, Sergeant.”

I see no fear in Pulley, but I’m hard-pressed to see signs of life at all. He’s the one I will have to watch.

I wrap up the briefing. “We’ll be leaving at oh dark, retard. Santos, how we doing on the C-4?”

“Sergeant, we got so many bombs, I can’t count ’em.”

Earlier in the week I gave Private First Class Victor Santos, my Alpha Team’s grenadier, a pallet of at least a hundred pounds of plastic explosives. The engineers taught him just enough to get us all killed. He’s spent the week packing Gatorade bottles with shrapnel, detonation cord, and C-4. Santos and I share a love for this shit. Knapp has taught young Santos everything he knows, and I can see his mind working overtime collecting each bomb he has made. Santos’s scalp still bears the scars from an enemy rocket that slammed his guard tower back in June. He spent two weeks at the army hospital in Landstuhl, Germany before returning to us. Most recently, Santos waived his leave to make sure he didn’t miss Fallujah. All he wants to do is kill bad guys.

“Go call your families,” I say. “They’ll be shutting the phones down as part of the OPSEC plan, so make sure you do that tonight.”

After I dismiss my squad, Sucholas walks up to me.

“Sergeant Bell, I can’t believe I’m going to die for this conspiracy to reelect George fucking Bush.”

I try to humor him as he continues. “I will die, you know. And it will be your fault. You’ll go to hell for it, too.”

He’s said this a dozen times these past days, and I’ve usually laughed. Tonight, it isn’t funny, not after my encounter with Chaplain Brown. The fact is, he may be right. Hell might be my ultimate destination. Sucholas departs, puzzled that I don’t even fake amusement. He can sense my distraction.

I tend to my duties for the rest of the night, running around for more equipment, ammo, and gear my squad can use. I round up extra dressings, tourniquets, and batteries. I grab an extra five body bags from Staff Sergeant Diaz. Finally, I have to get some sleep, or I will be no good to anyone. The operational tempo has been brutal these past weeks. Train, patrol, train, patrol—it has worked us all to the bone. This might be the last chance for a decent night’s sleep for several days.

I retire to my cot, but my mind refuses to shut down. I dwell on the skirmishes and firefights we fought over the summer. I refight April 8 and 9 in my head again, examining every decision I made and questioning every movement in order to glean more lessons, more ideas that might help us in Fallujah.

We’ll be fighting house-to-house again. We’ll be clearing rooms and fighting inside hallways at point-blank range. This will be my ultimate test. I have sought a fight like this ever since I joined the army.

Dominate the room.

Use controlled pairs.

Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.

Don’t be in a hurry.

Recharge your ammunition at every pause.

It is the most brutal and costly form of modern warfare. The casualties will be appalling.

I am ready.

I close my eyes to start a prayer. Using the template Chaplain Brown provided, I decide to go with the theme of leadership and invincibility over evil. Cory Brown is watching a loud movie on a laptop computer two beds down from me.

The Exorcist.

I can’t focus with all the noise in the foreground, not that communing with Him was going to be an easy exchange anyway.

I am ready. Dear Lord, I wanted to tell you….

I think about my soldiers again. I see their faces and think about when I was their age. They are ten times the men I was. Not at that age.

I once was a meek boy with a coward’s heart.

Not here. Not anymore.

Now I am a lost soul with hell on his shoulders.

And I am coming.

CHAPTER THREE

The Measure of a Man

November 8, 2004

Camp Fallujah

H-hour minus 20 minutes

Hooah. Go get ’em.
That’s all we’ve been hearing since we arrived at Camp Fallujah three days ago. Anyone with the rank above major has been given twenty minutes to address a captive audience—us. Captain Sims has even taken to videotaping his own speeches. Every morning, he gathers the company together to give another pep talk. At first, they were inspiring. Now I just want the fighting to start so I can be spared another lesson in rhetoric from Knute fucking Rockne.

Today, as the first faint streaks of dawn spread over the horizon, we stand in a task force formation in front of Lieutenant Colonel Newell as he gives us one last talk. He has to raise his voice so he can be heard over the distant artillery fire exploding a few miles to our south.

Around us, vehicles are warming up as their crews get ready to drive us to the pre-staging area. Once we’re fueled and ready to go, we’ll move to the staging area, then the attack position, and finally the pre-assault position at the breach. This is the choreography by which the United States Army moves thousands of men and vehicles into an attack and still retains a semblance of order. We learned to do this off Normandy, at Okinawa, at Iwo Jima, Inchon, and Hue. To us, it seems like a hopper. We’ll get fed in and tossed about until the big machine spits us straight into the city.

Lieutenant Colonel Newell continues his speech. CNN films it. In Germany, I grew to respect him when I saw the daily example he set. He always makes a point of rising earlier, running farther, and working harder than any of his officers and infantrymen. In Iraq he has proven to me a greatness in battle that is most uncommon.

At first, however, his speech strikes a tone similar to all the others. It fails to move me. But his final words pack a wallop.

“This is as pure a fight of good versus evil as we’ll probably see in our lifetime.” Now he has my attention.

“Nobody in the world is better at what’s going to happen than you. We’re gonna go out there and kick their asses. They killed our own. Twenty-seven of our brothers are dead and these are the assholes who are responsible. This is personal for me, and it should be to you.”

He’s right. Twenty-seven men from our brigade combat team have died since we reached Iraq eight months ago. This motivates me. There is no doubt in my mind that this assault will tear the heart out of the insurgency.

Newell finishes to cheers and Hooahs. A moment later, we’re dismissed. We stream toward our waiting Bradleys along with a bunch of support personnel. Before we get too far, Sergeant Major Faulkenburg appears. Normally, he looks at us all like we’ve just shit in his taco salad, but this morning his face is an absolute mask. I can’t read it at all. We all fear his wrath yet we also seek his approval. In his twenty-six years in the army, he has seen the ass crack and armpit of every trouble spot from Korea to Kosovo. We fear his emasculating rants yet we stand in awe of him at the same time.

He’s done almost everything you can do in the army, but he hasn’t done this. Fallujah will be tougher than any fight since Vietnam, and the look on his face makes me realize he harbors no illusions.

“Ramrods, take a knee,” he calls to us in his gravelly southern drawl. There are times I think he’s speaking a foreign language, his southern accent is so indiscernible. It’s like a cross between John Wayne and Ross Perot. Our task force is known as the Ramrods. Those of us in Alpha Company are the Terminators.

Alpha Company forms a horseshoe around Sergeant Major Faulkenburg. We get down on one knee and wait. At first, he says nothing. He spits a wad of Red Man chewing tobacco into the dirt as he eyeballs us with a squint. He takes the time to look each of us in the eyes.

I stare back at him. To me, he has always seemed big as a grizzly bear and twice as scary. But now as I study him, I realize he’s wiry and short. It’s the weight of his character that makes him seem so large.

“Men, I could not be more proud of you if you were my own kids.”

We wait for him to continue. He hesitates. He’s struggling with his emotions, and we see his eyes mist up. That sight sends a surge of emotion through me—part love, part despair, part blind loyalty.

“I couldn’t be more proud looking at how far you all have come and what you are about to do.”

He pauses again and lowers his head, his iron self-discipline fighting a losing battle with his heart.

“That’s all. Go get ’em.”

The mechanics and support guys start to cheer. Somebody shouts, “Give ’em hell!” Others shout as well.

For a moment, I can’t move. Sergeant Major Faulkenburg is our father figure. He’s the man I have most wanted to impress. I have wanted, and
needed,
to believe he was proud of me and what I’ve done with my squad. I never felt I did anything to be worthy of my own father’s pride. My father was the first person in the history of the state of New York to go from junior college to dental school, starting with absolutely nothing and accomplishing so much on his own. I sought his affirmation, but always seemingly in vain. I always felt I never quite measured up in his eyes. To me, it was my fault for squandering so many chances.

Here, now, I want more than anything to stand with Sergeant Major Faulkenburg as we head into the fight and to measure up at last. This time, I am determined not to fail. His few words have had a more profound effect on me than any of the pep talks of the past week. A great speech is only partly about what is said. Often what matters more is who says it and how it is delivered. Our sergeant major’s vulnerability and love for us spoke volumes.

As everyone else gets up to head for their Bradleys, I stay a heartbeat longer. Faulkenburg turns his steel blue eyes to me. No words are spoken, but in his eyes I can see something, a feeling coming my way. Respect.

A few months earlier, during a night firefight in Muqdadiyah, I was hugging a wall across the street from Sergeant Major Faulkenburg as he banged away with an M16 with iron sights. He could have taken a newer weapon and shortchanged one of his men. He’d sooner use a museum-piece rifle than shortchange one of his men. That is one of the reasons why everyone loves him: he never asked for anything more than what the worst-equipped man in the battalion had.