I Lost My Love in Baghdad (6 page)

I arrived and heard I had just missed a big one. Danny, a bomb squad tech from Tennessee, jumped out of a Humvee and rushed up onto the wooden porch of the shack, his face red beneath a do-rag, pumped on adrenaline, carrying a long sliver of metal. He'd just detonated the big IED. Ka-boom.

“Take a look at this shrapnel,” he said. “Big as a lawn mower blade. Touch the edge.”

I touched the edge; it was sharp.

“Imagine that flying through the air. That's sharp enough to kill you,” he said, then added the shrapnel to the collection in the Bomb Garden.

The twenty-one-man bomb squad worked in twenty-four-hour shifts, responding to calls from units all over the city. When patrols spotted an IED, they called in the bomb squad to get rid of it. The unit was led by Captain Gregory Hirschey, an all-American blond who carried around a large mug of Seattle-made coffee and a frozen bottle of Gatorade. To relax, Hirschey's soldiers spent most of their time playing Halo 2, the multiplayer video game, where futuristic warriors tried to kill each other. It got their minds off the war. Every time they went out, they knew there was a chance they'd be blown up. They were always going straight to the bombs. IEDs ranged from the simple and inexpensive to the complex and hi-tech. They could be triggered with infrared sensors, motorcycle alarms, trip wires, detonation cords. They could be pressure activated; they could be “daisy-chained,” to set off a series of explosions. There also were “second and tertiary devices,” bombs set up to kill units responding to an IED; bombs set up to kill the bomb squad. The guys in the bomb squad sometimes wore 120-pound protective suits that made them look like giant green marshmallow men. Often they'd deploy robots to defuse the IEDs, which they controlled remotely with a joystick and video monitor. Hirschey said that his best robot operators were also the unit's “kick-ass Halo players.”

I went out for four or five calls, and watched them detonate UXO (unexploded ordnance), of which there was plenty lying around Iraq. According to the State Department, even before the war there were 10 to 15 million land mines across the country left over from World War II, Iraq's eight-year war with Iran, and Desert Storm, making it one of the most heavily mined countries in the world. Hundreds of thousands of mortars, grenades, and other munitions from Saddam's army also were not secured during the U.S. invasion, which gave the insurgent bomb makers plenty of material to make their IEDs.

Hirschey was a father of three and didn't think he was going to make it out alive. He told his wife that he'd had a premonition of his death. “If you're going to die, why not die for your country,” he told me, trying to laugh it off. By the time they'd completed their seven-month tour, his unit had responded to 2,178 incidents. During the last month, one of his soldiers lost an arm to an IED. With only two weeks left before his scheduled return, Staff Sergeant Johnny Mason, a close friend of Hirschey's, was disarming one bomb when a second IED was detonated, killing him instantly. Hirschey told me he'd become numb to the threat. “After a while you quit looking,” he said. “I don't know what it is. You almost feel like you're part of the walking dead.”

My bomb squad story didn't run for a few months. It was overtaken by an event back in the United States, Hurricane Katrina.

I was sitting in the mess hall at Camp Victory, eating dinner with Captain Hirschey and the first sergeant of the bomb squad on the day Katrina hit New Orleans. There were wide-screen TVs in each corner of the mess hall, and all were turned to the Fox News Channel. At the end of dinner, the first sergeant pointed to three men watching intently at the table across the room. “There's your story,” he said. “Those guys are from the Louisiana National Guard.”

I changed tables and asked if they'd be willing to be interviewed. “The eye of the storm went over my parish,” one of the soldiers told me. On screen a white steeple seemed to emerge from dark water. “It's passing over the hospital where my mom works. She's a nurse.” The news reported there was no power at the hospital. Another soldier said: “I had to get emergency leave on the last squall to go home and fix the flooding in the basement. I can't imagine what this is going to do.” A third soldier leaned back in his chair. “People back home constantly worry about us,” he said. “Now we get a chance to worry about them.” The three soldiers were members of the 141st Field Artillery Unit in the 256th Brigade of the Louisiana National Guard. They had been in Iraq almost a year. They had eight days left on their tours before they were scheduled to leave. They told me banners for their homecoming had already been put up, and were now washed away.

The captain and the first sergeant had left the mess hall by the time I was finished talking to the Louisianan soldiers. It was up to me to find my way back to the bomb squad headquarters. It was dark, about 9:00
P.M.,
and all the huts and tents and trailers looked the same. At night, the base was an endless field of gravel, passing trucks kicking up a spectral fog of dirt particles. I felt like I was walking around the grounds of a county fair after the lights had been shut off and the gates closed. I soon realized I was lost. I walked off the main road and approached a building that looked familiar. When I got closer, I saw that it wasn't familiar at all. But painted on the building was the name of the 141st Field Artillery, with their nickname underneath, the Baghdad Headhunters. I had somehow, through no design of my own, stumbled upon the rest of the Louisiana contingent. About a dozen soldiers were sitting at a picnic table behind their headquarters. I introduced myself. “I'm a reporter for
Newsweek,
” I said. “I just spoke to some guys at the mess hall, and I was wondering if you mind if I hang out for a while.” They didn't ask anyone for permission. They gave me their names and started to tell their stories. They had one cell phone to share and were trying to get through to their families. They were depressed. After surviving a year in Iraq, after losing soldiers to this country, they'd just learned the city where they grew up and were on the verge of going home to was destroyed.

The cell phone rang.

“Hi, Mama,” said Specialist Jason Ragas.

The men quieted down.

“What side of the levee? The north side or the south side? Ten-plus foot of water throughout the parish? Where are you getting this? Nola.com? Can we get Nola.com?”

The men moved inside to the Internet to check the website. Fifty percent of homes in St. Bernard's Parish, where three men lived, were now gone. “I got a fifty-fifty chance my home is destroyed,” Ragas said.

“The roof of the civic auditorium was blown off,” one soldier said, scrolling the webpage.

“That's right by my parents' house,” said another.

The soldiers continued to look online, doing a neighborhood-by-neighborhood assessment. At one point Sergeant Robert Pettingkill said, “That's it, all my possessions, gone.”

Sergeant Jeff Bohne, thirty, told me he hadn't heard from his “hardheaded wife,” who had decided to ride out the storm in New Orleans with his eleven-month-old son, Jacob. Because of the deployment, he guessed he'd seen Jacob for a total of about thirty days. He was also supposed to close on a new home soon. “I don't care about the house, it's my son. I can't get through to them.” He tried to call again on a cell phone, and got the message: “Due to a hurricane in your area, this call cannot be completed.”

The feeling that they all shared: We should be in New Orleans, protecting our families and homes. We are the National Guard. That's what we signed up for, not Iraq. Many of them had been out sandbagging and distributing water in previous natural disasters. One of them said his wife even got a call this morning from the National Guard with a message for him to “show up at Jackson Barracks at eight o'clock. No shit.”

I went back to where I was sleeping—a two-bed trailer behind the bomb squad shack. I set up the satellite phone, balancing the BGAN modem on top of a Hesco barrier, a thick, five-foot-high cement container filled with dirt to protect the trailers from mortar attacks. I hooked up the Ethernet cable and sat on the steps of the trailer, the Sony Vaio on my lap. I dashed off an email advisory about the Louisiana National Guard and Katrina. The editors responded quickly. I passed out for about four hours, woke up, and started writing. The story hit the Web immediately—the first piece of reporting for
Newsweek
on Katrina, as the domestic correspondents had yet to get down to Louisiana and the scope of the disaster was just becoming apparent.

Later that week, President George W. Bush posed for a photo op in
Air Force One.
He didn't land in New Orleans to see the devastation firsthand, he flew above. A photographer snapped a picture of him looking out the window.

Everything looks peaceful from thirty thousand feet, even New Orleans after the storm, even Iraq.

My next request was to go to Fallujah, the site of the worst battle of the war in November 2004, less than a year earlier. Though the U.S. military claimed after the fight, which cost the lives of 273 Americans and over three thousand Iraqis, that they had “broken the back of the insurgency,” insurgent attacks in the city hadn't stopped. Both sides had become entrenched throughout Anbar Province, with Sunni insurgents and Al Qaeda fighters moving to areas surrounding Fallujah, and to the nearby city of Ramadi. My email to the military said simply: “I want to spend time with the Marines taking the fight to the terrorists,” a sentiment I figured would get me access.

I flew to Fallujah in mid-September on a CH-146 Marine Corps helicopter. It was a troop and cargo transport craft, with space inside for at least thirty men. It moved slowly through the air, the twin rotor blades on top—one in front and one in back—keeping it stable, and it felt like you were sitting on a floating platform. It was a forty-five-minute flight at night—they tried to fly the troops in after midnight to lessen the chance of getting shot down. When I landed at Camp Fallujah, no one had heard of me. A reporter? Hunh. Maybe you should go to the Embark tent. I didn't know what or where the Embark tent was. I hopped on a shuttle bus, and the driver told me he was going near there. I was joined in the bus by a platoon full of marines who had just arrived in Iraq. For the first time, I was the veteran, with a whole month of experience under my belt.

At headquarters, no one had heard of me, either. Not so unusual. They told me to spend the night in the Embark tent until the public affairs officer woke up in the morning. They explained the Embark tent (for disembark) was where all new arrivals were kept until they were assigned permanent barracks. Rows of green cots stretched back into darkness. I lay down, but knew I wasn't going to sleep. Marines came in and out, quick bursts of flashlights pointing at the wooden floor. There were fits of coughing, endless snaps of rucksacks being opened and closed, thuds of men searching for boots. Wristwatches beeped on the hour, and the occasional digital alarm clock went off accidentally. Four air conditioners were on full blast. I'd made the mistake of taking a shower the day before, and bringing my damp towel with me. I didn't want to take out my sleeping bag, as it was already 4
A.M.
and I would have to roll it up again in two hours. So I just covered myself with the towel, damper than I expected. This was a mistake. I was freezing. I went outside and smoked and talked with two marines who had arrived that night for their first tour. They couldn't sleep, either; both had a look of shock on their faces. The reality of their situation had started to register—they were actually in Iraq, sitting on a base called Camp fucking Fallujah—and they would be here for at least a year.

The next day the public affairs officer found me. He was a weird dude, a gangly forty-something man with acne scars who told me he considered himself something of a journalist, having worked for an army paper on Okinawa, and that he missed his wife, who was from some South Pacific island. He told me to speak to another public affairs officer, a young female marine lieutenant who had arranged my embed. We tried her office, and were told, since it was Sunday, she was probably at mass. We finally tracked her down in the mess hall. I sat down across from her. A marine officer sat down next to me; she introduced him as her husband. They said a prayer, which caught me off guard—I'd never seen anyone pray over KBR food. We chatted briefly about being married in a war zone; they both expressed gratitude that they were able to deploy at the same place, at the same time. Then she told me what my schedule looked like. I'd be with the 2-2 Marines, who would soon be going out to patrol a main supply road heading into Fallujah. I got a lift across Camp Fallujah in an SUV to meet them.

Four Humvees were waiting for me, the marines milling about the trucks.

Lance Corporal Robert Freeman was my driver. He told me to call him “Freebase.” I asked Lance Corporal Freebase what was on the itinerary for today.

“Drive around and don't get blown up,” he said.

I wrote this down.

“You gonna put that in your magazine? Make sure you say it's from Freebase.”

Lance Corporal Freebase had just turned nineteen, he said. He smiled and gave me a Marlboro Red. Lance corporals, he informed me, had the lowest life expectancy of any Americans in Iraq.

We spent the afternoon patrolling up and down a two-lane highway, pounding Mountain Dews for caffeine, kicking back a Red Bull, smoking Marb Reds in the Humvee, stopping to take a piss out in the middle of the desert. Up and down the road, thirty miles an hour, so hot your brain gets tired. It was the platoon's usual patrol for “route security,” making sure it was clear of bombs. They did it six times a week for eight to ten hours a day. There was not much to look at—rough sand flattening out under a blue sky. I dozed off a few times, lulled by the weight of my helmet, the heat, and the slow rhythm of the Humvee.