None Left Behind (11 page)

No matter how hard they tried to forget the war, however, it had its ways of intruding. Chiva Lares' truck hit an IED on his twenty-first birthday. Robert Pool got mortared on his twentieth.

Specialist Pool, who wanted to be a psychiatrist one day, was tall and slender with light-brown hair and a wife waiting back in California. He had come up hard on the streets, more or less abandoned by his parents to make his own way. He got into pushing dope and was likely on his way to prison sooner or later when he met his wife and enlisted in the army. He liked to say he went from big man on the streets to big target in Iraq. In California, he was accustomed to punks holding grudges, but it took some real getting used to when people started trying to blow him up.

Victor Chavez sang
Happy Birthday, Dear Shitbird
to him while a couple of other guys burped in accompaniment. Then Third Platoon had to pull a mounted/dismounted patrol to search for roadside IEDs. Pool's squad, led by Chavez, did the dismount and was trudging through the weeds and underbrush about fifty meters off and parallel to the road when Pool heard the unmistakable bloodcurdling whistle of an incoming mortar round, then a loud
Thump
as the shell impacted on Malibu near the slow-moving trucks. The dismounted half of the platoon hit the dirt; the mounted half hunkered down inside their armor.

Four more rounds followed in quick succession, thudding up and down the road, geysering up black smoke, asphalt, and dirt, and filling the air with the terrifying whine of shrapnel. Good thing the Jihadists couldn't shoot for shit. During the lull that followed, Sergeant Chavez ordered his squad to break for the armored safety of the hummers.

Pool was huffing up the road bank toward the nearest truck when a shell streamed down like a Roman candle and hit the road directly in front of him. It was a dud. Instead of detonating and killing or wounding the entire foot squad, it bounced twice like a stone skipping on water and slammed into a house on the other side of the road where it finally exploded, blowing a hole in the poor farmer's house.

A couple of turret gunners spotted seven or eight Baghdads with AK-47s hot-footing it across the road about three hundred meters away. They were probably supposed to be the attack cleanup element but had chickened out when they saw the mortars had caused no damage. Third's gunners lit them up with .50-cals and two-forties. They vanished into the countryside. As usual, the QRF found little except a few blood trails and some poor bastard hiding in a house with blood on his trousers. He was taken to Brigade for questioning and detention.

The adrenalin was still pumping when Third Platoon returned to 152. Fourth Platoon on base security detail wanted to hear all about it.

“That was something else, man!”

“Sounds like it. Anybody hurt?”

“No problem. You ought to see the vehicles though. Ricochet dents all over them. It was fucking crazy.”

“For a change, just one time, I'd like to see a good firefight initiated by us instead of by them.”

“Happy birthday, Bobbie,” James Cook said.

Pool hoped it wasn't his last.

Conditions at the patrol bases were decidedly primitive, especially at the outset. Men ate nothing but MREs supplemented by whatever they received in care packages and, infrequently, by kabobs they purchased from vendors or, as with Second and Fourth Platoons that time, chickens
from the local markets. On security watch, an infantryman did everything he could to stay awake and alert. He drank coffee, dipped tobacco, figured out ways to smoke cigarettes without letting any light escape.

Sleep following a shift was more important than anything else—more than money, happiness, or sex. Yet, it seemed sleep in the hot houses did everything it could to evade a man. He would wake up rolling in sweat, get up and drink Gatorade, then go back to his sweat-soaked sleeping bag to wrestle with sleep some more. Some of the guys tried sleeping on the roofs in the open air like most of the Iraqis did. Only, flies started swarming an hour or two before daybreak, taking over from the night-shift mosquitoes, making it impossible to sleep.

Under Colonel Infanti's guidance, conditions in the AO gradually improved. As he informed his battalion staff, “We want our guys to be able to fight outside the wire, but when they come inside they have got to feel secure taking off their gear. They need reasonable chow, cool water, a comfortable place to sleep, toilet facilities, some down time . . . Make it happen.”

A “meals on wheels” from Battalion eventually began delivering chow to the outposts at least once a day, providing the truck didn't run over an IED and have to be towed back. One afternoon, Staff Sergeant “Cookie” Urbina and his kitchen in a trailer showed up at Inchon to whip up the best meal any of the Joes had had in weeks. He had come to stay.

Cookie was around forty, a small man with a stout Hispanic accent. His talent for creating gastronomic miracles with Raman noodles and powdered eggs, spicing them up with condiments for a little variety, immediately made him the most popular soldier in Delta Company. On chilly autumn nights he always had a hot pot of soup burbling on the stove for whenever the men came back from the field. Sometimes he sent soup cups out with them.

“I'd marry you today if you weren't so
damned
ugly, Cookie,” Anzak teased.

“Puck you, Joe.”

For Thanksgiving, Cookie prepared a turkey dinner with all the trimmings, consumed by the men in stages as they came and went on their duties. The war never stopped. Everyone looked forward to Christmas
when Cookie promised to pull out all the stops. Lieutenants Dudish and Tomasello offered to take their platoons on another shopping spree. A Christmas goose sounded nice.

Water for the troops was a life-or-death proposition in a climate where temperatures often reached triple digits, even in the winter. Bottled water supplied their needs at first. Coolers powered by small generators kept it almost cold. After a while, the outposts received large rubber donut-shaped storage tanks that supplied running water for the patrol bases. Eventually, there were even warm showers supplied by two hundred-gallon drums assembled on the flat roofs of the houses where the water could be heated by the sun.

Gasoline-powered generators provided energy for lights and computers—and eventually for air conditioning to cool off the bunkrooms and make life in the desert almost bearable. This luxury, however, did not arrive until the beginning of summer in 2007.

In World War II or Korea, as in most wars, the advance of an infantry outfit could be traced by the path of litter it left in its wake—cast off C-ration cans, food wrappers, empty ammo crates, greasy fire pits, half-filled-in latrine trenches . . . In Iraq, one of the first tasks of the new U.S. “green-conscious” army was to construct sanitary burn and waste disposal pits to eliminate litter. The tongue-in-cheek motto of the Green Army became a standing joke: “Leave the war cleaner than you found it.”

“Wag bags” served as the dogface Joe's first toilet. Wag bags were simply heavy-duty trash bags into which a soldier did his duty. Then he tied a knot in the top of it and delivered it to a pit to be burned. Any violation of the practice was bound to cause a stir.

“Sir, I just seen a guy taking a shit out in the open.”

“Wonderful. That's the kind of report Battalion needs. Did you offer him a Handi Wipe?”

Medics were in charge of sanitation and preventive medicine. The first shitters they built at the patrol bases were too high, so that legs dangled whenever soldiers sat to take their constitutionals. Later, pre-built wooden toilets were trucked in. They had metal buckets underneath the holes, like the ones used in the 1991 Operation
Desert Storm,
but wag bags still had
to be utilized. This was accomplished by the soldier spreading his bag across the mouth of the metal receptacle, then afterwards escorting the filled bag to the burn pit as usual. No more Vietnam-era mixing diesel with wastes and burning out the cans.

Iraqi Army terps and soldiers stationed at the patrol bases with Americans turned out to be a major hitch in solving the sanitation challenge. Most lower-class Arabs wiped their asses with their bare hands and were accustomed to sleeping next to where they shat and shitting next to where they ate. The back yard enclosed by the blast wall at Inchon, where most of the IA were stationed, turned into a minefield from the terps taking their dumps right on the ground. Even after “porta-potties” were installed, the IAs still preferred the open ground or, worse yet, the plywood ledge next to the holes in the latrine.

The location of the mines was quite frequently pinpointed by the sound of angry cursing when a patrol prepared to exit the compound at night and some groggy GI stepped in a mess.

“I am going to profoundly
shoot
the next motherfucker I see drop his drawers—”

Life was lived according to the next patrol—and that produced an entirely new angle of routine in the lonely forts on Malibu Road. Between missions, some of the men went off to themselves in the dark and chainsmoked cigarettes, puffing away while their hands shook. Yearning to go home. Hell, yearning to go
anywhere
away from here.

“When this war is over,” Sammy Rhodes said, “basically I am going to pack up my stuff and
walk
all the way down Malibu Road back to the real world.”

“You're kidding, right, Sam? This war ain't ever gonna end.”

“I don't think we should answer the radio anymore,” Corny Courneya proposed. “ ‘We're sorry. Delta ain't in at the moment. Please leave a message at the sound of the tone and we'll get back to the war when it's more convenient.' ”

It was easy for hard, dirty, exhausted infantrymen to become cynical and angry. Guys' minds could get all weird, what with being away from home and wives and girlfriends and living together and picking up all the
rumors about who was getting divorced, whose wife was leaving him, whose girlfriend was pregnant or diseased or “acting funny.”

“Man, the bitch's letters have gone all freaky. What I think is she's screwing some other dude while I'm over here.”

“My girlfriend has broke her hand. Either that or she's forgot how to read and write. I ain't got a letter from her in six weeks. What do you think, Anzak?”

“You always got me and Brenda the Bitch.”

Specialist James Cook's daughter was two years old when he deployed. He was twenty-three years old, a skinny little guy, like a tough tree branch. He suspected his wife was running around on him.

“I can hardly picture what she looks like anymore,” he said. “She'll be gone when I get home. My little daughter is growing up fast. She won't even remember who I am . . .”

“Home. What's that?” Justin Fletcher wondered.

Sergeant Chris Messer kept a picture of his wife and her last letter to him in his breast pocket, along with his laminated copy of the Prayer of Salvation. He memorized the letter, like he tried to memorize his wife's face and the sound of her voice. Whenever he got all quiet and withdrawn, someone would ask him, “Are you sick, man?”

“Naw,” someone would answer for him. “He just misses his wife and wants to go home like the rest of us.”

“Sergeant Messer thinks God's wrath has descended upon us for invading the Garden of Eden. Messer, will you pray for us?”

“Jeez cheez! What's a guy got to do around here to get some sleep?”

Everyone knew everyone else's private affairs. Chris Murphy was saving all his money in order to send his alcoholic mother to rehab and get her a decent place to live. Cournyea's mother was jealous of his fiancé Jennifer, complaining that he spent more time with her than with his own mother. Byron Fouty wanted to request reassignment to a medic slot in order to help people in Iraq like other medics were doing. Anthony Schober was going to buy a ranch in Nevada, although no one ever thought him to be a cowboy. Jared Isbell's girlfriend Kathy was breaking up with him. Alex Jimenez was distraught over having told a lie to his grandmother.

She had begged him not to return to Iraq for another tour of duty. He lied by telling her he was going on a training mission somewhere else and therefore would not be in any danger. She passed away while he was patrolling Malibu Road, without knowing the truth.

Delta Company possessed one satellite phone for use by its four platoons. Each soldier was allotted ten minutes each week to call home on it. Although it provided contact for couples who missed each other desperately, it could also be a double-edged sword by providing an avenue for conflict in relationships already frayed around the edges. The romantic notion was of yellow ribbons wrapped around trees and Sally waiting at home faithful to her man. The truth was a bit more complicated.

For some of the Joes, it was hard cleaning up their act after living with a bunch of soldiers and then trying to talk like a normal person on the phone with a wife or mother. They sometimes found they had nothing to say. Imagine calling home after a bad day in the war.

“Honey, it's great hearing your voice. Are you okay?”

“Uh, you know, same old stuff. Killing and dying. How about you?”

So many times, no one answered at the other end of the line. Disappointed husbands and fathers strayed into quiet corners to smoke cigarettes and stare into the darkness of their thoughts. It was easy to imagine all kinds of things.

After having already been awarded two Purple Hearts for wounds suffered in battle, Lt. Colonel Michael Infanti was still on the move, albeit with one knee trussed for support. Delta's Second Platoon met Iron Claw and Husky at Yusufiyah for an IED sweep the length of Malibu Road from JSB (Jurf Sukr Bridge) through Delta's three outposts to the old Russian power plant. Colonel Infanti and the four trucks hauling his PSD hooked up with the procession as an opportunity for the commander to meet with soldiers in the field and get a look at how things were going. Malibu Road was still the most active region in the AO.