None Left Behind (14 page)

“They're right on the river,” Montgomery relayed. “Twelve o'clock. On my signal, fire these fuckers up . . .
Now!”

The roof of 151 lit up like a Christmas tree with the flickering of rifle and machine-gun fire. The sound trapped inside the walls was deafening, echoing as it crackled and rose into a fierce crescendo. M203 grenades spouted short in the water. Machine-gun rounds racing across the water before they chewed into the riverside foliage resembled schooling piranha.

It was remarkable. It was exhilarating.

The Baghdads didn't get off a single shot. They jumped up and ran for their lives, carrying or dragging their weapons and casualties with them. Two-forties and SAWs riddled the sedan, sparking and shattering, until it careened down the road and into the shadows of the night. A .50-cal would really have done a job on the car had there been time to set one up,
leaving the insurgents stranded and at the mercy of the fierce fire from the roof. None of them would have escaped.

Spontaneous cheers, catcalls, and taunts erupted from 151. “Allahu Akbar
that,
motherfuckers!”

It felt good,
good,
to shove hot lead up their asses after all the Joes had suffered from them during past weeks. Soldiers of Second Platoon swaggered around like gunfighters as they recounted for the other platoons, in detail, how they had finally turned the tables on their tormentors—at least this one time.

“You should have seen it, man. We lit them fuckers up. They hauled ass like the back-shooting cowards they are. The Colonel's right. We
are
going to bring law and order to Malibu Road. Like Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday in Dodge City. There's a new sheriff in town, boy, and he's walking tall.”

Delta Company soldiers expected something to happen whenever they went out. They kind of got used to it, but at the same time they didn't. They kept going down that same treacherous stretch of road through and past the S-curves. Specialist Robert Pool got where he lay awake in his bunk and went through in his mind every curve and bend in the road from JSB past Patrol Bases 151, 152, and Inchon, past the 109 Mosque and the old Russian power plant, speculating on where and when he would get it and how bad it would be.

GIs knew the do's and don'ts of the war by this time. Platoon leaders and sergeants constantly preached caution. Don't cross footbridges and high traffic spots. Never take the easy road. Go around. Never let down your guard. Recognize the signs if you wanted to live.

One hot, windy afternoon, Specialist Brandon Gray walking dismounted point for First Platoon came upon a little footbridge spanning a drainage ditch. As he was about to cross, the wind riffled a thread of white cloth knotted on a tree next to the bridge. He jumped back, recognizing that that was how Jihadists marked their booby traps to warn locals to stay away from them.

Sure enough, there was an all-but-invisible trip wire stretched between two roots and across the approach to the little bridge. One end of the wire was attached to a 155mm artillery shell buried in the ground. It contained enough black powder to blow a crater in the earth big enough to bury the entire squad. One more step, Gray realized, and he would have stepped into eternity.

Sergeant Montgomery had witnessed his first IED when 2
^nd
BCT initially took over from the 101
^st
. A 1
^st
Cavalry vehicle triggered an explosion that shoved the bottom of the hummer right up through the passenger
compartment, igniting a fire and killing one trooper. Since then, three Air Force EODs had been blown up and killed in the AO. One was a female. They responded to check out a suspected site. When they climbed out of their truck to look it over, some turd hiding nearby with an old telephone set off a second explosion almost directly underneath their feet. And, of course, he was there the day Colonel Infanti's vehicle hit the IED and Scarface died.

Insurgents never seemed to run short of bomb making ingredients. Prior to 2003, Iraq had actually possessed more conventional munitions than the entire U.S. military, with something like six thousand ammo dumps in the country. Insurgents had carted off the contents of a large number of these before Coalition forces could secure them. Coalition forces had also left a large number of expended 105mm and 155mm howitzer shells lying around. Jihadists policed them up; stuffed them with black powder, ammonia nitrate fertilizer, or even chicken shit mixed with diesel fuel; stuck in blasting caps; and, lo, they had effective and deadly booby trap IEDs that could be set off by pressure plates, crush wires, or command-detonated with a garage door opener, a car alarm, or a wireless telephone.

There was little GIs could do to protect themselves against IEDs. Iron Claw and Husky couldn't be everywhere for every patrol. Second Platoon alone was blown up 47 times during the weeks after Delta Company occupied the patrol bases on Route Malibu. Fortunately, most of the explosives weren't powerful enough to do much more than rattle the GIs around like pebbles in a tin can and bust tires, windows, and axles. What the Joes feared was hitting a really huge bunker buster like the one that caught Colonel Infanti and killed Scarface. Or like the one that finally took out Iron Claw.

Fourth Platoon was on a route mission with Husky and Iron Claw in the lead when Sergeant Joshua Parrish overheard EOD on the radio suddenly shouting for everyone to get down and take cover. You knew something was coming when EOD panicked.
Boom!
The explosion blew the indestructible Iron Claw in half. Part of it flew over Parrish's hummer and landed on the other side of the road.

Delta trucks ran constantly, day and night. Soldiers on that single stretch of Malibu through the S-curves were being attacked more than any others in Iraq. It turned into a fishing game, but it was hard to determine who the anglers were and who the fish. Platoons always traveled in squadrons of at least four trucks, moving at about 25mph and spaced no closer than fifty meters apart, all heavily armed with mounted .50-caliber machine guns, two-forties, and M19 automatic grenade launchers. Steering vehicles through the perilous landscape was nerve-wracking and monopolized every last bit of a driver's attention. Like rats or cockroaches, insurgents kept sneaking up to the road after nightfall to plant more IEDs, which often resulted in wild Fourth of July displays of orange flame and dirty gray billows of smoke the next time a convoy drove by.

Getting blown up became almost a spectator sport. Every Iraqi in the vicinity disappeared just before something was about to happen. The kids were always the most obvious as they scurried for cover. As soon as the IED went off, however, jetting a spray of earth and smoke several stories into the sky, every hajji around crowded up with children in arms to see what the commotion was all about. Naturally, nobody ever saw anything. Deaf and dumb as a bunch of sand crabs.

After each attack, Americans and IAs pushed through the nearest villages and settlements rounding up every male of military age for interrogation. They ransacked houses for weapons and used metal detectors to probe yards for buried stashes. They questioned suspects in hopes of catching them in lies that could be leveraged into workable information on anti-Coalition terrorists in the area. It was sheer craziness. Pathetic-looking figures sitting cross-legged on the ground with burlap bags pulled over their heads and their wrists flex-cuffed behind their backs. They were either ballsy little bastards or else they were scared shitless at the prospect of being turned over to the IA, where the Queensberry Rules did not apply. Big NCOs manhandled them and conducted strip searches, voices barking orders.

“Stand up. Take off your pants.”

Delta Company tried everything to stem the assaults—mounted and dismounted patrols, static watches, cordon-and-search raids, rewards,
bribes, intelligence gathering . . . Nothing seemed to work. Week after week, it was more of the same: IED and mortar explosions, the chirping, whistling sounds of shrapnel shards spinning through the air; the screaming of rocket grenades launched from concealment; the sudden ring of a sniper's shot . . . And always the men felt they were being watched by dark plotting eyes. Someone proposed more than once that they assassinate Crazy Legs. At least get rid of
that
pair of hostile eyes. No way in hell could it go on like this indefinitely without the Joes losing their minds.

After a while, Sergeant John Herne was the only man in Second Platoon whose truck hadn't been blown up by an IED. The other Joes competed to see who would ride with him. Men wanted to rub his head for good luck. It got so bad that it sometimes took the army's Rapid Repair Road crew days to get around to filling up the numerous IED holes up and down Malibu Road. In the meantime, insurgents crept up and planted more IEDs in the bottoms of the craters in order to blow up the road crews when they finally came around.

That led to the establishment of 24-hour-a-day “crater watches” to guard the holes. Sergeant Chris Messer of Second Platoon protested.

“It's crazy to put a static watch out there,” he scolded Lieutenant Dudish, his platoon leader. “We're asking for them to be ambushed and our guys wiped out.”

“I agree with you, Sergeant,” Burke said. “But we still got to do it.”

Neither would know for several months yet just how precognitive Messer really was.

In spite of all the activity, Delta Company was fortunate. Although a number of soldiers had been shot or suffered concussions and various other IED injuries, no American had been killed so far. The Joes kept getting up, dusting themselves off, repairing their trucks, and returning to the fray.

The reason the 10
^th
Mountain Division was deployed so much and to so many different places—and then to the angriest parts of those places—was because its soldiers were some of the best in the military. Even so, good soldiers could break under the strain of uncertainty, privation, fear, separation from home, and combat that was both nerve-wracking and strange in that the enemy was nowhere and at the same time everywhere. There were only so many times they could turn themselves on and off. It was like repeatedly heating and cooling a length of metal. The process eventually weakened the material over time until it ruptured from the strain.

Shaking hands, chatting up merchants, flirting with shy girls, and handing out candy and little presents to kids had been easy until about the eighth or ninth IED. After that, the soldiers began to have second thoughts. They still wanted to make friends, be good neighbors, but they lost the illusion that they could build a relationship one-sided. They became more curt with Iraqis, wary, suspicious, unable to let down their guard for even a moment lest the manticore that stalked Malibu Road get them.

At the same time, the longer American troops remained in the AO, the less cordial everyday citizens became. A lot of it had to do with resentment at the inconvenience of the occupation. Closing off roads to through traffic meant farmers had difficulty transporting their produce to market. Stopping people to check their ID cards and raiding in search of terrorism suspects further annoyed the population. Soldiers on Malibu could almost feel the hate in Iraqi hearts as they passed by in their armed and armored convoys. It seemed the people were merely waiting for the Americans to get fed up with the shit and go home. They didn't believe the Americans
were here to stay until it was over and that they would have to cooperate with the Americans in order to bring about better days.

Colonel Infanti constantly reminded his troops that things were going to change. There would be a turning point. Persevere and stay strong, he encouraged. We're a team. Every soldier is important to the chain of command. We're suffering right along with you. Change is coming.

Yeah? When?

Mosques were behind much of the trouble, especially those controlled by Sunnis. Imams bitterly harangued their congregations about the invaders and prodded them to resist, creating even more insurgents.

“These sons of monkeys and pigs come to Iraq in the name of freedom, but they are poison that will change our lives. They will shave our beards; take the dresses and veils off our wives, sisters and daughters; seduce them and turn them into whores. We must ask Allah to rain darkness upon the American and Jewish pigs. Please, God, kill the Americans and Jews, destroy them and eject them from our country. Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!”

Insurgents used the mosques as safe houses and there was little GIs could do about it except shoot the finger at the 109 Mosque every time they passed it. Raiding a mosque to disinfect it was out of the question; it would be like poking a stick into a hornets' nest at the response it would generate throughout the AO.

The trick to pacification lay in ridding the land of insurgents while weaning the people away from them. As far as American soldiers were concerned, the only way to get rid of fanatics was to kill them, wipe them off the face of the earth. They were little better than predatory animals. After all, what kind of men wired themselves with suicide belts and blew themselves up on Israeli school buses full of very young children? Who launched rockets indiscriminately into Tel Aviv churches, schools, and houses? Who hid out in caves to manufacture anthrax or the Bubonic Plague in order to wipe out the cities of those they considered infidels? Who would hijack airplanes full of innocent women, children, and babies and fly them into skyscrapers . . . ?

You had to know your enemy.

“We're here to help, don't you understand?” Army Civil Affairs officers pleaded with local sheikhs and community leaders. “If you don't stop bombing trucks and start fighting insurgents, things are going to get much worse.”

No constructive aid or rebuilding projects could be launched until residents put a stop to the murderous assaults and the AO became less dangerous. PsyOps (psychological operations) soldiers went through villages and towns handing out leaflets or shoving them underneath gates and doors. Some of the handbills cautioned locals that attacks on Americans would be dealt with harshly. Others offered rewards for information on terrorists or weapons caches.